I’ve built a couple of fairly hefty transmitters without silver solder. I don’t get your point.

The main use cases are certain alloy joints. I’ve seen it quoted as having better mechanical strength but that’s not what’s solder is for!

> I’ve seen it quoted as having better mechanical strength but that’s not what’s solder is for!

That depends. Back in the day when I did this work large end stages were built pretty much 'in the air' and in the stuff I worked on there were trimmers and coils that were pretty heavy and that were only supported by the solder. So we used silver for those joints, and they held up pretty good.

Hefty => 1KW and up...

As for the skin effect, that is the reason we did it in the first place, but I never had access to the kind of gear that would have allowed me to test in practice what the difference was and I've long ago stopped doing this sort of thing.

Ah yeah that sort of stuff makes sense. Most of the high power stuff I did was with waveguides. Never needed it for VHF or lower.

Skin effect makes sense. Hence why I use silver plated stuff in my VHF stuff.

I actually tried to build a 100 to 200 MHz end stage using stripline to get rid of all of the hand wound inductors to replace them with silver plated traces but never could get it work in a predictable manner and I lacked the math background to figure out what I was doing wrong. The people that can do that sort of thing intuitively are magicians to me :)

I can highly recommend Signal and Power Integrity from Eric Bogatin.