[TowerTalk] Running coax to tower
Gene Smar
ersmar at verizon.net
Mon Sep 8 17:38:49 EDT 2008
Roger Cooke wrote:
> <snip>
>
> At my previous place I did have an 80ft length of 4inch water pipe buried in the ground coming up into the shack. I was able to put three coax cable through that using a draw cable, but after that it all got into an awful mess, as the cables tended to corkscrew around each other. I gave up on that idea.
>
>
K8RI wrote:
<snip>
Sure they wind
around each other but that's never been a problem. I do use lots of
"wire soap" which makes pulling in even the larger cables fairly easy as
long as there is room.
TT:
I worked in one place (can't tell you where, though) that had cables wound and corkscrewed around each other in conduit systems as described by both gents above. For a total rehab of the facility the AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction) ordered their tech crews to rotor-router the conduits (for our non-American readers, that's a trademark name for a sewer cleaning system that uses mechanical circulatory blades to clean out home sewer lines) 'cause the cables were too tightly wound around each other to remove single cables at a time. They were too heavy and tight to remove as a bunch, too.
All the more reason to use the largest conduits you can install/afford.
One suggestion to minimize this winding of cables around each other: Lay out the full length of cable to be pulled (space permitting) on the ground, rather than pay it off the reel. If the cable is very long, lay it out in twenty-foot runs left-to-right-to-left in front of the feed-in conduit. Laying out the cable this way tends to work out the twists that the cable has when pulling off the reel. When pulling this way, you're adding only twenty-foot long lengths of cable to the weight of the cable at a time, rather than trying to pull the entire 500-foot length through the hole at once, as would happen if you ran the cable in a straight line up to the conduit entrance.
Of course, if you're pulling hardline, you ought to do what the pros do: Install a block above the conduit entrance and pull off the reel that is being turned by an electric revolving drum.
73 de
Gene Smar AD3F
More information about the TowerTalk
mailing list