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Copper tape from Biltema

Copper tape has been suggested as a material for creating antennas and RF-shielding plastic boxes. Copper tape can be bought where garden supplies can be found, apparently slugs and snails find it difficult to walk across it. Not all copper tape has electrically conducting adhesives. If the adhesive layer is sufficiently thin, I’m not sure that this would make a large difference at RF, since I guess there will be plenty of capacitive coupling. But a conductive adhesive can only improve shielding or antenna performance. The copper tape sold at “Clas Ohlson” is explicitly sold as having non-conductive adhesive. The tape at Biltema comes with no information about the conductivity of the adhesive. I bought a roll to experiment (89 kr/roll).

The Biltema copper tape (article no. 29-2506) is 40mm wide and comes in a roll of 5m. I cut a 20 cm strip and measured 4.3 mOhm using Kelvin connections.

Measuring resistance of a 20cm strip of copper tape

I then cut the 20cm strip into two strips of 10cm, and pasted them on top of each other (with 9 cm overlap). I measured the resistance between the top and the bottom strip to be 94 mOhm.

Measuring two 10cm strips with 9 cm overlap.

I conclude that the adhesive on the copper tape is sufficently conductive for most purposes.