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Re: Topband: Mother of all ferrite common-mode coaxial chokes

To: <topband@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: Topband: Mother of all ferrite common-mode coaxial chokes
From: "Tom W8JI" <w8ji@w8ji.com>
Reply-to: Tom W8JI <w8ji@w8ji.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:31:24 -0400
List-post: <topband@contesting.com">mailto:topband@contesting.com>
Hi Carl,

> Youre welcome to your opinion based upon your experience Tom.

It is much more than experience. Good science can be proven or illustrated 
through experiments and measurements. Opinions are just opinions, and have 
the same value as the effort that went into confirming them.

For example, a bead does not "keep a signal inside a cable". It simply 
changes the outside shield impedance. The outside of the shield, at a few 
hundred kilohertz or higher, is isolated by skin depth from what the filter 
affects. If we have significant or problematic outer shield currents on desk 
gear, it would be much better to fix the bad cable, bad connector, or figure 
out why the cabinet is behaving so poorly that unwanted currents spill over 
to the outside of the cable.

There are valid applications for coaxial isolators, but they are all outside 
the shack or away from the desk equipment.

> While 160 never presented any problems your rebuttal to the YCCC paper was
> generic and on 20-10 and also 6M I beg to differ based on my and others
> experiences.

Personal opinions, without reasonable technical backbone, don't mean much. 
Data, or at least good logical explanation of how something works, goes a 
whole lot further than opinions, guesses, or personal declarations.

You can see how a wired connector disturbs common mode sensitivity here:
http://www.w8ji.com/coaxial_cable_leakage.htm

Scroll down to Connector Mounting and you will see just an inch of open 
connection to a non-chassis mounted connector on 8 feet of cable ( actually 
8' 3" with that pigtail installed) increased 40-meter common mode response 
by 40 dB over an 8-foot long cable routed normally.

If I had common mode ingress or egress issues on higher power RF cables in 
my shack required illogical band-aids and hole plugs, I'd figure out what 
was really wrong with my equipment, cables, or wiring.  :-)    If stuff is 
built and wired correctly, there isn't even a reason to use RF grounds on a 
desk. They'll make no difference at all. Neither will isolators or beads on 
RF cables.

73 Tom 

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