# Any experience with quartz crystal oscillators?



## Marcel (Oct 15, 2012)

I got some buckets of quartz crystal oscillators.


I have checked them in the past for PMs, but was never able to find more than:
- 2 golden bond wires
- a little bit that might be silver

any experiences anybody?


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## Geo (Oct 15, 2012)

open one carefully. there should be a round or sometimes rectangular quartz chip that is plated with silver. the arms connected may be solid silver as well. being coated on crystal, it has no base metal underlay. the silver is pure. there is about a 1:1000 chance of finding one that the crystal is gold plated.


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## etack (Oct 15, 2012)

I got some from motorola radios and they where gold plated. A Lot of work for next to nothing in them. 

Eric


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## acpeacemaker (Oct 15, 2012)

I had the gold experience with the Motorolas as well. However, with the silver ones I didn't know about the silver arms. I threw away about a 5 gallon bucket full with the caps.


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## rheslin2 (Oct 16, 2012)

i too, have been throwing these away, we need to come up with a pictoral list for us newbees who are just starting out, saving pieces and parts, reading and studying, just a quick list with a brief desciption of what to pull off during your harvesting, and a brief desciption of what the item contains....much like the second post in this thread with a photo. good idea? does this list already exsist? it seems every time i think i know what im looking for someone post a picture of some object i have been throwing away telling me each one contains a pound of gold! (lol) if need be i will start the thread ........


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## texan (Oct 17, 2012)

Not so fast.....there are many xtal packages that have gold on them. Many have been used in early cell phones and pagers. They seem to be used mostly in high end circuits that have "outdoor" applications. There are many sub-miniature circuit boards on cell phones that have a gold bottomed xtal package under a covering. Most of these are found in late 1990's vintage analogue cell phones. Many pager designs from the 80's and 90's have 2 of them.

Texan


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## Marcel (Oct 17, 2012)

I have sold 1000 pcs in lots of 100s with different values for roughly 50€ on ebay today. So unless there is no protest, I think that is better than anything else.
You were right Sam..
Marcel


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