They made me take an ESD course at work and well I have a few comments I feel forced to make.
Forgive me. static mats are poor conductors which allow the charge to equalize slowly. Humans, in fact are not poor conductors. So the only purpose of the wrist strap is to keep you at the same potential as everything else. But picking up a static sensitive device is not safe. You are a good conductor. You have much capacity. Picking up a static sensitive device in a static bag is ok, placing this on a static matt is ok. After a bit you the bag and the static mat are at the same potential so you can open the bag. The only reason you have a large value resistor on a wrist strap is so you don't get electrocuted So when you take a static sensitive device and put it on a metal conductor (PC board) you might have a fast enough discharge to fry the board. This subject goes on forever and some of it is counter intuitive. When you have a discharge you might have failures months or years later. It may be damaged and it may work fine. For a while. I hate mentioning all of this but this is what they taught us. Larry again forgive me. -- View this message in context: http://elecraft.365791.n2.nabble.com/Fw-Anti-Static-Mats-tp7586729p7586732.html Sent from the Elecraft mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
