Coax season

Don’t ever do this when you are old!! Actually, I was just trying to get your attention, but what I am talking about here is the need to change your station’s coax feed lines. I have been a ham for more than a few years…20 almost now…and from the start, I have been slowly adding to my station and moving antennas and coax around as the need demanded. Most of the time the scenarios went like this: I got a new antenna or radio and needed another antenna! I used whatever coax was around. I had developed a rather nice feed point through the space around my chimney in the attic, which hid most of the coax until I started to think about the danger I was inviting into my shack. All of that ungrounded coax running right through the middle of the house! Oh, I had a station ground…but that was different from my lightning ground and my electrical ground…you see the point. But that was only half the issue…because I had lots of RG213…that was the coax of choice for everything. Turns out that’s fine for HF, but perhaps not for other applications. So, I pulled all the wire out of the attic and laid it out on the roof. One by one, I started to replace them all with appropriate less lossy coax.

There is a story here as well. Buying coax has turned into a very confusing business. Most of the providers do not make their own cable…and some don’t even label them properly. Any cable not labeled with a brand and type was trashed first. Go to any one of the representative cable and wire provider sites (and of them all ABR is the most informative and educational) and you will find all sorts of conflicting information…numbers don’t always match across lines… Pasternak’s RG 217U does not match the Wireman’s of a similar style and type. So when I bought connectors for the RG217U I bought from the Wireman, Pasternak’s connector’s didn’t fit? Baffling. (I am not using this coax in my house…this was for a different project).

The journey continues as I am not entirely sure even today that I know the very best type of coax for weak signal 2 meter or UHF work. I suspect it is hard line, but for now, I will take the losses because the money tree we planted last year still has not produced fruit!

So I pulled most of the old RG213 and replaced it with LMR400 and RG8x. I have been buying stuff for this project for a couple of years, so now the issue was finding it all! I had a ground bus bar, and an exterior connection box, which was too small for this project, and then my buddy Greg Karlove came up with an interesting plastic weather proof box. I retrofitted the grounding bar into that box and put a PVC pipe to join it with the other smaller box. And yes, I could have bought something even larger, but beggars…etc. It’s fine because I am making one box for HF and other for all of the VHF and UHF connections. So, this box is now outside of the house. All of the coax leads to it…and so far so good. Now, I find myself short about 10 feet for most connections to the shack! And, that bag of PL259’s that I have been coveting for years for just this sort of project is all but gone. No idea where it ended up (probably used on our various Field Day enterprises). So, in went my first order to our new neighbor to the north, HRO, Ham Radio Outlet. After I managed to set up an online account….for some reason it would not acknowledge my email address????!!! …still not sure why because I have never purchased on-line from them before? (Where do all of these phantom email addresses end up? I think Facebook keeps them and calls them subscribers?!!!)

So, now I am at the soldering phase….lots of soldering. I wish I could say that has been therapeutic, but since most of this work has to be done outside, it is not as much fun as I had expected. I need more warm fall days. And, frankly, it has been tiring to climb to the roof, add a new cable, build a connector, run down the roof to the box etc. But I am optimistic that all of this work will pay off. It is hard work…reversing and re-engineering the work done slowly over many years…but that is part of the hobby. Learning. Building. Re-building. So, by the time I get this project done, perhaps the solar cycle will grant us better conditions to do HF again!!

Next, thinking about beverage antennas…no Mark, these are not for drinking!!

73, Rob K9RST