Silver plated copper for antennas, pointless ?

[TheBlaster]

Following on from copper vs steel.. I have seen a few antennas with silver plated copper wire. I imagine this will make zero difference to signal going in and out. Any thoughts ?

I have seen the words "greater efficiency" and "stronger signal" in various commercial antenna descriptions.

 

[TheBlaster]

Silver tarnishes so is likely a bad choice practically speaking. This was interesting for those interested... and the answer in this case seemed to be a yes it is better. Brass seems not to be a good conductor on his list, that possibly explains a few things to my mind. Those antennas must be influencing each other, if the signal source is coming from one side of his array of 3 antennas, especially so. I don't understand why people go to such trouble and then test 3 at the same time.. he must know this with his knowledge and technical experience.

With 3 antennas so close they cannot, not be influencing each other.

 

[Justme]

Nope won't help anything.
We do silver stuff on 70 cm and higher but on the lower frequencies the normal copper will work fine.
I even used a stainles steel ( 316) wire dipole and checked that against a copper wire dipole, the difference was negible though the SS wire has a high resistance, but using 3 mm cable that effect was only a few %, so no need to silver that stuff, and how do you keep it clean from corrosion?, cover it with gold?
The Youtube movie is about a 2.4 GHz antenna, 100 times higher as 11 meter.....

 

[Captain Kilowatt]

Silver plate is a waste of money. You will NOT see any difference on a signal meter. We are talking about a fraction of a dB at the MOST. As for the reference to brass, we used to run solid brass Jampro FM broadcast antennas on one of our transmitters and we had four sites that used solid brass co-linear groundplane antennas on 172.68MHz. Nothing wrong with brass antennas except weight. Do not go too much by the resistance of a material to determine if it will make a better antenna or not. "Better" is simply relative. 0.02dB will NEVER be noticed.

 

[Handy Andy]

Do some research of Skin effect...

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With Silver, there may be a benefit - minor at lower than as you go up in frequency - the MUF and the thickness required for the RF signal transfer works better with silver but the main reason for this is the PROPERTIES silver provides versus copper or any other material when it in reduction (oxide) - RF passes thru it with the same resistive effects than others that suffered exposure to corrosion.

You can read more of the article here...

 

[Tallman]

Copper is best "TIN" plated.