[TowerTalk] Cable loss revisted.

[Jim Brown]

On Fri, 5 Feb 2010 05:34:31 -0800, Jim Thomson wrote:

> cringe at the thought of the loss on the coax cables used. 

Yes. My neighbor, K6XX, has paid careful attention to that, as have 
I. Our design objective is no more than 1 dB loss on any band. Some 
of our feedlines are long, and are run with hard line. My 120 ft 
high dipoles are fed with RG11. 

I was recently involved in discussions with a DXpedition team about 
coax. Their antenna layout wisely had antennas widely separated, and 
some feedlines were 500 ft long. It was a fight to get them to use a 
low loss RG8 rather than high loss RG8X. The accountants and 
managers on the team wanted the smaller cable to save money on 
shipping costs. In some cases, the DIFFERENCE in loss was nearly 
3dB!  The engineers on the team won. :) 

73,

Jim K9YC