It seems 50 is enough. In fact I found a page that said gold plating ranged from 3 to 6 microns, up to 50, which is the best.
Of course the question remains, doest it really have anywhere near that much, especially considering the first plugs I found were only 12 cents each, and shipping for as few as 1 or as many as 10 or more was only $3.
But the much bigger problem is finding jacks, surface mount, and JB did that.
As of yesterday: Except for Radio Shack brand, which with shipping is now 2 or 3 times the price it was at the store, this is the only surface mount that mentinos gold that I've found:
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and they only say "Gold-Plated Screw Terminals". Woudl they really be dumb enough to gold plate the screw terminals, which don't need it, and not the springy things that touch the plug contacts?
Fancy that. Hard to find gold and here it is right here at Home Depot.
I'll probably get it this morning. Thanks a lot.
I'll change the plug for a new one and get gold plugs a little later
Rewiring is not really an option, Bob. Long story. But this is the first real problem I've had in 10 years and with gold instead of copper I'm probably good for 20 more**. I'll rewrap the connection too, and maybe check the wrapping in less than 10 years this time. (There's a motorcycle in the way now, which I have to sell.)
I may use the grease too, thanks Unc.
**That will make me 88 years old. I'm going to have a lot of work to do that year. I hope I'm up to it.
I'm not accusing Micky of trolling, but he didn't actually say the jack was outdoors.
If it's outdoors, that explains it. He said it's a surface-mount jack. You should never put a surface mount jack on a house that will be underwater, as so many have been since 2008. He should use a submarine jack.
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I'm glad Tony recommended it. It's a lot cheaper than DeoxIT.
I first found grease in a telephone jack at a neighbor's service entrance. I thought somebody had goofed because other jacks I'd seen at service entrances had been clean. I learned grease was SOP for the phone company.
I once set up a carport light with three-way switches. The outdoor switch box was well protected from rain, but switches didn't last long. Outdoors, a switch can sometimes be colder than the dew point. That means condensation. The same thing could happen in a telco service entrance box. That explains why they use grease.
Got an outside line (POTS/DSL) from my point-of-access (PA) to house. Couldn't find a single line long enough so connected two lines with dbl-female union. Over the last Spring, lost both phone and internet connectivity several times. Each time it was mold ("black") on the contacts of the mid-line union.
My solution: old tooth brush and WD40 (which is a water displacement (WD) formula, not a lubricant!). Hosed all connections w/ WD40 and scrubbed mold out with toothbrush. Worked well in dead of rainy-season as a quick-fix, but finally hadda buy a new union.
I'm not trolling, and I did refer to the outdoors early in my poem, though I didn't specifically say the jack is outdoors. It is.
Do they really make those? I sort of looked.
I read that RJ13 or maybe RJ15 are waterproof for marinas, but googling them only gave me telephone museums. Even though there is wireless everything now, there must still be something that is waterproof.
But it's easier to use a normal jack and put the junction in a ziploc bag. That's what I did, but the bag fell apart after 8 or 10 years, and I found an inch of water in the bottom of it yesterday (though when I snapped the cover off the jack box, it was dry inside. But probably humid.) This time, even with the gold, I'll use a new ziploc bag and some tape around the opening I have to have.
As to flooding, I live right next to a stream which, after enough rain, maybe once every year or two, it can go from being 10 inches deep and 12 feet across to 10 feet deep and 30 feet across. Maybe wider, it's hard to see. It rises to literally one inch from my property line. It took a couple episodes to start me "worrying", but after another 20 years** I was convinced my house will never flood.
For one thing, besides that one inch, the stream would have to rise another 6 inches to go over the outside window sill of the basement window. Plus the higher the water gets the wider the area it has to cover is. I was told that before it gets to our lawns, it would have to cover the street on the other side of the stream (and about 80 feet of woods.)
This was all designed after Baltimore had had some severe flooding during Hurricane Agnes, in June of 1972, before I got here and before the townhouses I live in were built in 78 and 79. Besides lots of other damage in the city and state^^, three to five houses just a mile downstream from me (though on a bigger stream) were washed away**** and the county was determined that that would not happen again.
****The area is a park now iirc, though I think I could tell that it was composed of empty lots. I don't know but I have the impression that the county bought the houses after they were destoryed at near market prices as if they were still there, on the theory that the county should never have permitted their construction.
^^"In the state of Maryland, damage totaled to $110 million and 19 fatalities were reported." In one area a few miles from here water was
40 feet above what was normally dry ground. I think that's when the county also insisted that every new housing development have a catch basin for water runoff, to slow its arrival at streams and to prevent flooding. A house I almost bought had had 16 inches of water in the basement, but they did something to that stream too there has been no more flooding there, and afaik there has been little or no flooding in all of Baltimore County and City in the last 30 years. .
What I should have done is drive over there when the stream is at flood stage and see how close it is to flooding the street, but I didn't think of that for the first 25 years, and the chance hasn't arisen since.
**(It's been 32 years by now, plus the house was here 4 years before I bought it, and I know from the pristine basement that nothing went wrong in those 4 years.)
The front of the house where the jack is is about 14 inches higher than the back, and the NID, the phone company junction box, is about 8 inches higher yet, and the wire I have running out of that is no lower. The in-house wiring failed somewhere 10 or 15 years ago and I can't find the problem***, plus I decided I wanted the wiring to go straight to the DSL modem. Prior to the failure, it went to the basement (and to all the wired phones) including to the kitchen and the kitchen phone, to the upstairs bedroom, to the DSL modem. I wanted the telephones last, not even in parallel but after the modem, and even now that I have only one phone, a base station for 3 wireless extensions.,by running my this wire, I want that and I've got that.
*** Besides the jacks in 3 rooms that the house came with, I installed
6 more jacks, including one for a handset in the bathroom, with a ringer behind the wall plate, a switch to turn off the ringer, and a neon light to work if the ringer is off, and a switch to answer the phone with.
I looked for quite a while, testing, disconnecting, connecting, then gave up for a year and used my outside wiring, then I determined again to fix it, but when I went back to the house wiring it was working fine, but for only two months. Then it failed again and I looked for the problem again, and after that the DSL advantage made me give up on the house wiring..
Me too. I have a new girlfriend and I'm going to try to make her some gold jewelry with this stuff. I'm sure she'll be impressed.
Instead of the lubricant WD, you might try Caig Deoxit. A friend suggested that to me, for some electronics connections. Well worth the $15 on Ebay. Also to displace water, dielectric grease is good. Advance Auto Parts has it in the row with the RTV and other small tubes. I've used dielectric grease water displacer on many things with success.
DSL via POTS (plain ol' telephone system) can drop only the DSL signal OR only the phone signal OR both. I've had good, scratchy, and plain ol' dead from both signals, independent of each other. No kidding. internet connectivity worked fine, but phone signal was dead. I'm still scratching my head on that one. ;)
Well, maybe I should go into detail. The first time I thought to test the phone I called myself and it said it was a disconnected number. Yikes! I thought, that would explain why the internet didn't work.
Later I looked at redial and it really was my number. And I used redial and got a busy signal, So I think the first time the line was so scratchy .... it misinterpreted a tone to be a diferent number.. That's impossible.
I haven't had the last one, But I have had iirc Usenet works, email works, but web doesn't work. That's when I actually let someone from the phone company come out. Even though it was my fault, I don't think he charged me. He said there are several levels of failing.
While I was talking to him, either he or I decided my wire from the NID to the modem was inadequate. It was flat stuff used to go from the wall to the phone, and it was cheap flat stuff, because I'm cheap, and it never occurred to me it could degrade anything. I bought 100 feet of it, because I'm not totally cheap. It was also still wrapped on the spool, 75 feet of it, so maybe that caused inductive problems. I think I had just put it in because, like in your previous post, I had been using two wires conected with a dbl-female, and I knew that would be trouble.
But this wire was thinner than that, and when I put that in, I lost my web!. So I went to the round white stuff meant for inside the walls, and stiffer than the minimum is what I had. And I put modular jacks on each end and a very short male to male modular cord on the outside going to the NID. (and another longer one on the inside to the modem, but that one doesn't get wet.) And my download speed tripled from two kinds of wire earlier. (since there was almost no downloading with the wire I used second.) People have told me this can't happen, but it did and I'm 98% sure there was no other reason.
And that's where I am now.
I have some thin shielded cable that is supposed to replace the round white wire, maybe later this summer.
Also found gold RCA jacks, even at Home Depot. If I coudl find a gold RCA plug, I might use that instead of RJ11.
Went to Home Depot
Found what J.Burns found for me. (Thanks again)
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White surface mount phone jack. Says gold contacts on webpage. But not on package. Also ivory phone (4 springy things) and also white internet (8 springy things) Items look alike, packinging looks alike, all 3 same price, only the one 5 lines up says gold on webpage, but like I say, not on package. How could it be gold when the others are the same price and none say it on the package? Tune in and learn the solution, in the next post.
All same Model #, 468 and either 4C or 8C but different Store SKU's and different Internet #'s
First time I have trouble, woman looks it up for me on computer at Contractor's Desk. Second time, she gets off the phone to go to the back of the store. I say, Can I use the computer? She says yes. Logs herself off. But when she comes back from somewhere else in the store, she's impatient with me. Oh well.. She was still polite, but one could tell.
Last time, 15 years ago, or so, no computer and no more copies of the CD someone said they had, and the webpage was very inaccurate. It and Lowes' the two worst on the net. Now it's pretty good, except today.
All three listed, just for the record, but there's nothing I haven't told you.
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