>>
>> On the hose encased coax, when you "zipped it out of its self-buried
>> trench," did water also zip out? K4VUD
>
>
>Why bother to hose your coax? If it doesn't need armor, get direct burial
>and be done with it! Unless you provide drainage, air, or desiccant it
>will get wet.
>
Ok, here are the answers.
First, no, the cable was clean and dry after I zipped it out. It was still
giving good service. I pulled it only because I sold the vertical antenna
that it was feeding and put up a 100 foot tower in a different place.
Second, I already owned a proper length of new RG214. A member of my club
made it available dirt (heh, heh) cheap (25 cents a foot) in a group
purchase. Why buy more cable when I already had some? Also, there are
some rocks in my soil. I would frankly be afraid that one would pierce the
jacket or compress the dielectric somewhere along the run, resulting in
ruined cable or an SWR spike. The garden hose kept its shape, allowing no
pressure on the cable. I choose not to deal with the mess of flooded cable,
either, and since I run frequencies below 30 MHz, more expensive cable
would be a waste of my resources.
By the way, I have buried conduit feeding the tower. This is because I was
able to trade an unneeded section of used Rohn 45g for the whole conduit
installation (materials, trenching and labor). (I had 110 feet of tower and
my zoning only allows 100 feet).
Folks feeding multiple antennas plus a rotor, as I do now, would probably
want to go the conduit route, as one would need as many garden hoses as
they had cables. My suggestion however is a very strong candidate for
consideration by anyone with a simple one-antenna installation. It served
me flawlessly for the three years I used it, and I'd use it again in a
heartbeat.
73, Bill
Wilbur Long
Biology Department
Western Maryland College
2 College Hill
Westminster, MD 21157
USA
410-857-2404
wlong@wmdc.edu
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