I agree with you that he doesn't what the thinnest cable. Don't agree that you can just grab anything off the shelf and use it in a situation like this.
Check out this page. http://www.ocarc.ca/coax.htm If you think that the difference between 9 watts out of a 25 watt radio compared to 20 watts out of a 25 watt radio needs test equipment to tell the difference then you might want to read up on your radio theory again. Might as well throw out the big radio and use the hand held at that point because it will probably have more watts out. I am not saying to run the biggest cable either. I am saying look at the sizes you can fit in easily with a bend radius that will meet your needs and then pick the one with the lowest loss. But hey if you want to go to the Rat Shack and buy some high loss cable with crappy insulator and shielding and trust your life to it go right ahead. Vern -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 10:49 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Liveaboard] FW: VHF ant Flying Pig wrote: > Hm. > > So, I should go with the thinnest, most manipulable coax I can find? I don't > mind spending the few (in the total boatbux scheme of things) extra to get > the best, and all this discussion about marine vs not and the salt water > problems certainly has my attention. > > Making the swap is the biggest hassle for me, not the money (though I'm your > classic skinflint about where and how we spend our money), so I sure don't > want to do it again if I don't have to! > > Meanwhile, I have a pigtail which end fell off (which could explain my > original attempt to see about a working antenna's failure) which I'll > rebuild. I'm currently kludging the Uniden (previously the nav radio with > the rx problem) at the helm and could easily disconnect the arch antenna and > use the pigtail and the one I fetched down from the mast to see about that > antenna's condition. > > The one I put up there must be something else from Metz, designed for AM/FM, > as it's got a very much longer whip... > > L8R > Vern disagrees with me. You don't want the thinnest coax. That would possibly be RG-174 which is very lossy at VHF frequencies and would be unacceptable. Since you have HF capabilities you probably don't need to go to the extreme of putting up a very low loss cable, as Vern suggests. IMHO, 8X is just fine. It's flexible enough and has an acceptable loss. With HF as a backup, you aren't out of touch if the vhf signals won't stretch quite far enough. Personally I believe it would take instruments to detect the difference between 9913 and 8X and practically you'd seldom if ever need the couple of DB gain the bigger coax would give you. But that's my opinion only. I have a 100' chunk of low loss cable around here, perhaps I'll rig a couple of whips on the roof of the house using RG-58 (Not X) and the better cable and do a comparison. There are plenty of repeaters in the Atlanta area to test on so I'll have a great variety of signal strengths to compare. While 2 meters is surely lower in frequency than marine, the difference is loss is slight. There's only about 10 Mhz difference (147 vs 156). Of course that will have to happen after it stops raining. :( Jim. _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
