I had very poor luck using stranded copperweld wire at my home in Aruba.
It was used for temporary contest low band antennas and it was stored
inside 90% of the time. The steel wire became very brittle and even when
using great care strands would break when trying to set it up. Eventually
I replaced some of the copperweld wire and a year later the same problems
developed. Perhaps solid copperweld holds up better however it is more
difficult to work with. I had no problems, not even stretching, with
antennas made from 14ga solid thhn.
John P40A
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] remote tuner Vs lumped constants
From: Jim Lux <jimlux@earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 06:23:23 -0700
On 7/24/13 8:59 PM, K8RI wrote:
On 7/24/2013 11:34 PM, Gene Fuller wrote:
I don't understand the problem with copperweld. I have three 160 meter
quarterwave slopers and three 80 meter bent vertical dipoles using
alumoweld that have been up about 40 years with no problems. As I recall
it is 20% aluminum.
Gene / W2LU
What I had appeared to just be copper plated steel. It was listed as
CopperWeld. Whether it was the real stuff?
I see the definition as "hard drawn Copper welded to a steel core"
There's several flavors of this clad steel wire..
Copperweld is a tradename for one mfr. http://fushicopperweld.com/
(history is here http://fushicopperweld.com/en/about/history.html)
There's many flavors of clad wire..
There's copper clad steel (CCS) which is what is traditional for antennas
and rural powerlines, but there's also aluminum over steel (used for power
lines) and copper over aluminum.
The cladding thickness varies. You'll see 21%, 30%, and 40% IACS
(conductivity relative to a pure copper wire of the same diameter)
For 10AWG diameter (0.1019") the cladding is
21% IACS 0.0776 mm
30% IACS,0.1812 mm
40% IACS,0.2588 mm
Skin depth at 10 MHz in copper is 0.021 mm, so even 21% IACS CCS has more
than 3 skin depths.. Go down to 80m where skin depth is more like 0.035mm,
and you might want to consider one of the othes.
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