More than one engineer has been bitten by the nickel flash under the gold
plating on microwave circuits - similar to the discussion in the article.
Yeah, silver plating is usually done to make it look pretty - and that isn’t
often optimum for RF properties. There are plating processes that are intended
for RF, but it’s specialized, and often with a much thicker plating than used
for “pretty”. You see it when silver plating aluminum (or carbon fiber)
waveguides, for instance.
One other aspect of silver plating is that it can form whiskers - I’ve not
heard about it as much as tin whiskers, but that’s probably because silver
plating is pretty rare these days - if you want solderability, it’s gold,
usually ENIG (gold over nickel).
On Sun, 1 Oct 2023 16:50:34 -0700, Wes <wes_n7ws@triconet.org> wrote:
This might be of interest:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/w5u2m0qvuwjs0i3vlwdsf/Plating.pdf?rlkey=n99dlrd2joh5548drtczvtsks&dl=0
Wes N7WS
On 9/30/2023 12:38 PM, Jim Lux wrote:
> Silver plating is usually very thin, and doesn’t have a huge effect on the RF
> resistance. One advantage is that silver oxide is conductive, copper oxide
> is lossy. Also, if you have a moving contact - silver is MUCH better than
> copper in terms of staying low resistance.
>
>
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