Topband: RX Power over Coax

[Richard (Rick) Karlquist]

Exactly right.  I had trouble with "critters"
chewing my coax.  Nothing bad happened until
it rained.  Then the rain got into the coax
and the water interacted with the
DC voltage on the coax; terrible noise.
With the DC off, there was no noise even
when soaked.

I converted the DC feed to CAT-5 cable and the
problem disappeared.  Another advantage of
CAT-5 is that you get 8 conductors, all
independent of the RF coax and the earth
ground.  Also, for whatever reason, critters
don't like it :-)  The RF coax was eventually
stuffed thru 1,000 feet of cheap sprinkler
pipe repurposed as "conduit".  Good enough
to keep the critters out and rain out.  But
I elected to keep the CAT-5 for DC.

73
Rick
N6RK

On 10/6/2020 3:09 PM, donovanf at erols.com wrote:
> Hi Lee,
> 
> 
> Your testing will be inconclusive unless you inject water into your
> connectors, or you could just move to Maryland where we get at least
> 45 inches of annual rainfall and it gets into everything thats not well
> waterproofed
> 
> 
> 73
> Frank
> W3LPL
> 
>