[TowerTalk] Copper Wire For Antennas

[Wes Stewart]

I never buy wire at the big box.  Here in Tucson we have an electrical products 
store that caters to the trade, but likes business from DIY too.  They are about 
half the price of big box and they are locally owned.  Find one in your 
neighborhood.

If you actually want drawn wire to break (why I don't understand) bend it a few 
times or put a kink in it at one end.

On 12/28/2016 1:09 PM, Hank Garretson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 11:09 AM, Jim Brown <jim at audiosystemsgroup.com>
> wrote:
>
>> There's another very practical issue with the use of ordinary copper wire
>> for antennas hung between supports -- copper stretches!  I found that my
>> high dipoles strung between trees at 130 ft with the tension needed to keep
>> then sort of horizontal with 160 ft or so of RG11 trying to drag them to
>> the ground stretched enough that I must lower them and circumcise them
>> every few years.
>>
>> A far better solution is to buy #8 solid bare copper from your local big
>> box store and hard draw it to #9. In effect, you're pre-stretching it. :)
>> Pretty simple. lay out 200-250 ft of it, tie one end to an immovable object
>> (tree, utility pole) the other end to a trailer hitch on your towing
>> vehicle, and very slowly pull while an assistant observes. When it breaks,
>> coil it up and repeat.  With assistants, I've done this for four 1,000 ft
>> spools, each of which yields about 1,200 ft of #9. :)
>>
> Do you have a trick to make sure it breaks at one end or the other instead
> of the middle?
>
> 73,
>
> Hank, W6SX