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Owen Duffy · October 5th 10, 09:12 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna

Art Unwin wrote in news:1b9f0821-e110-4722-852a-
:

Antennas usually are made of aluminum as copper is somewhat heavier
and silver and gold is to expensive. Since lead is now banned in a lot
of places especially with solder you can now buy solder that is doped
with Bismuth !
Now you can't coat your elements with it but if you have a solder
bath you can run copper wire thru it. The bismuth is brittle
but with the underlying copper it is stiff enough to stick it on the
antenna elements. I am assuming that the applied current would travel
along the bismuth coating instead of the aluminum and therefore should
increase gain for antennas that use coupling methods such as the Yagi
tho bandwidth may well suffer some what.
What do you think?

I am not sure whether you are considering coating the elements with
solder, tin, or bismuth... but they *all* degrade the RF resistance of an
aluminium element.

Nevertheless, hams are suckers for snake oil salesmen. Just look at the
products sold for antenna wire, open wire feed line and whips... so you
might have an opportunity there Art.

Owen