Re: Soldering to gold plated terminals
Gold is not always a good thing in our (ie this forum) business, not just because in wrecks solder joints.
Many years ago, I had to find out why a unit of a large computer would fail in the field, only for the faulty unit to work perfectly once returned to the factory.
Turned out to be a VLSI chip in a pin grid array package with gold plated pins in a tin plated socket. The ride back to the factory cleared the resulting bad contact, all our shake rattle and roll treatments to try to get the fault to show were just improving things. The device spec called for tin plated pins to match the socket, but I guess goods inward folk thought gold was better than tin, so let them through.
Having dissimilar metals in contact is not a good idea, even if one of them is gold (unless contact pressure ensures a gas-tight seal). Something to be kept in mind when updating your hifi cables for super duper gold plated ones, I’ve seen gold connectors on aerial cables, but not on Belling type sockets.
Stuart
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