Hello All, I am putting up a UHF repeater in Seattle and have a question regarding feedline losses. The repeater site is on top of a building and the distance from where the repeater/duplexer will be located is less than 25 feet of coax distance away from the antenna mount.
Of course I would like to reduce the system losses as much as possible so I'm willing to pay for ~25 feet of 7/8" Heliax. However my question is more about the loss experienced with inter-series connectors in the feedline. The 7/8" Heliax is not very friendly to bend and route into the cabinet for direct connection to the duplexer, so every repeater I've seen has a short chunk of something more friendly like RG-214 going from the duplexer, through the cabinet, and then joins to the Heliax with some kind of N-male/N-male adapter. What kind of signal loss occurs through such an adapter at 442mhz? On such a short run am I losing more signal through a Male/Male adapter, such that I just may be better off running a single segment of RG-214 the entire 25 feet? As far as I can tell, 25 feet of RG-214 would be about 1.28 dB of loss, while 25 feet of LDF5-50a Heliax would be as low as 0.2 dB, but if a single Male/Male adapter causes anything close to 1 dB of loss than it seems like a wash to me... Thanks for any advice. 73 and Merry Christmas to everyone. Mark Hagler W7WMH Seattle
