46 years as a ham with cables laying on the ground, in the ground and routed
through ceilings, walls, crawl spaces, and basements. I'd never had critter
probles, that is until last winter. I noticed I was no longer getting a
signal from one of the two UHF TV antennas at 90 feet. I thought possibly
I'd fried another remote pre amp, but swapping the cables at the grounding
plate near the bottom of the tower proved the antenna and preamp were
working. So I started following the RG-6. I didn't have to go far. About
half way betweeen the bottom of the drip loop and the grounding plate I
found the cable was chewed more than half way through. It looked like it had
been brushed up against a grinder, removing a bit over half of one side.
This happened to be right at the snow level and apparently there were some
starving mice. At-any-rate I replace both runs with flooded RG-6 and raised
the grounding plate enough to keep the drip loops out of the snow, or at
least *normal* snow levels which are nothing compared to what we used to
get.
>
> The best way to protect your cable run is to put it in to conduit.
> One customer bought hundreds of feet of gray plastic conduit to run
> his 213 as the critters in his neighborhood had already eaten several
> runs of cable.
Coax, rotator, and control cables form drip loops near the bottom of the
tower and then enter the bottom of a large hoffman box through a 1' stub of
4" PVC which is sealed with expandable foam. For some reason the critters
don't appear to like that stuff and it also keeps the wasps out of the box.
*THOSE* are the big problem around here. From the box the 4" PVC conduit
goes underground and to another Hoffman box about 75 feet to the South on
the back side of the house.
http://www.rogerhalstead.com/ham_files/cablebox.htm (The first photo is a
bit out of date and needs to be updated)
>
> Application of moth balls might help as possibly would a pepper solution.
I do throw 3 or 4 mothballs into the Hoffman box on the tower. They only
last a month or so in the summer heat.
73
Roger (K8RI)
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