[hpsdr] Suitable solder for Atlas

[Robin Davies]

Just got an Atlas kit to solder up, and I'm really looking forward to building this; mechanically it looks a lovely board to hand solder so I have no fear of that aspect of the build. I mentioned the gold plating on the PCB to a work colleague who is involved in designing and building specialized engine control modules for rally & racing cars, and he cautioned me around the concern of gold embrittlement and the need to be careful using SN bearing solders on gold plated PCBs and contacts. He described IBM having some TI prepared SMT components falling off boards due to this concern, and pointed me to this article - http://www.semlab.com/goldembrittlementofsolderjoints.pdf.

My colleague's boards have very dynamic thermal & high mechanical shock environments to live in...whereas my Atlas will sit quietly in a server rack. After searching the forum I haven't seen any noise around this issue with Atlas boards, and I'm guessing a fair few (all??) were just built using standard Sn bearing solders. This is my first gold plated PCB...but my experience with gold plated contacts is that they (seemingly) solder very easily;  without my colleagues salutary warnings I would have dived in this weekend to build this Atlas board. Now I'm a little more tentative...but given other builders experiences should i just plunge in with standard 60/40 solder ... or is there more to this and a need for a more careful strategy for a reliable board? 

Thx
Robin G7VKQ
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