AFAIK gold on connectors is for anticorrosion purposes. Not particularly useful for say, a gaming mouse, but for an outdoor antenna i can see the use case.
Gold connectors are a waste of money. Regular N or PL259 are fine, just cover them with a little acid free dielectric grease. Outside for anti-corrosion, inside for anti-seizing. Wrap it with vulcanizing rubber tape, add some regular vinyl tape just to keep it in place until it sets. Do this properly and it will last for years, even in sideways sea-spray.
I’ve seen some people use heatshrink hoses for this, but it’s not as good and a pain in the ass to remove once you need to service the connection.
Source: The amount of ships’ antennae I’ve installed with cable termination is in the hundreds. Maybe even over a thousand.
i am wondering, since signals are AC in nature, it should be possible to coat connectors in a super super thin layer of polymer (anti corrosion) and it should still work, it would increase the capacitive resistance tho
AFAIK gold on connectors is for anticorrosion purposes. Not particularly useful for say, a gaming mouse, but for an outdoor antenna i can see the use case.
Gold connectors are a waste of money. Regular N or PL259 are fine, just cover them with a little acid free dielectric grease. Outside for anti-corrosion, inside for anti-seizing. Wrap it with vulcanizing rubber tape, add some regular vinyl tape just to keep it in place until it sets. Do this properly and it will last for years, even in sideways sea-spray.
I’ve seen some people use heatshrink hoses for this, but it’s not as good and a pain in the ass to remove once you need to service the connection.
Source: The amount of ships’ antennae I’ve installed with cable termination is in the hundreds. Maybe even over a thousand.
i am wondering, since signals are AC in nature, it should be possible to coat connectors in a super super thin layer of polymer (anti corrosion) and it should still work, it would increase the capacitive resistance tho
Frequency-dependent connectors could work, but would be seriously counter-intuitive to work with.