In article ,
Roy Lewallen wrote:

2 or 3% silver is added to tin-lead solder to prevent leaching of gold
or silver terminations from certain surface mount components (and the
terminal strips in very old Tektronix scopes). These components are
often used for hybrid circuits, but solder-coated terminations seem a
lot more common for components intended for PCB use. I haven't seen a
leaching problem with the solder-coated terminations using ordinary
tin-lead solder.

Is there some other advantage of a 2 or 3% silver addition?

A fair number of surface-mount components (caps and resistors) use
silvered terminations. Some of them have an anti-leaching coating
over the silver (nickel, or solder with or without silver), others
don't. There's also silver plating on some of the RF connectors I
use. I'm probably being excessively cautious, but figure that it
can't hurt to use a silver-loaded solder and it might save me one or
two failures over time.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
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