[TowerTalk] Wire antenna in trees? (Patrick Greenlee) (Kelly Taylor)

[Steve Maki]

Just this past weekend I stripped my low band tower (160 & 80) of all 
wire and coax (it was an all day job, wore me out!), in preparation of 
changing the basic design. As far as antenna wire I had a mixture of 
solid copperweld, bare hard-drawn stranded, and black THHN.

This wire was up for 20 years at least.

The copperweld and bare stranded was all green, but mechanically sound. 
As I recall the copperweld was a good variety with enough copper to not 
expose the steel core - I saw no rust. It could be scraped and 
re-soldered I think.

Oxidized stranded is more of a problem to clean and re-use if you want 
to solder it. I suppose an acid bath of some sort might work - never 
tried it.

The THHN looks immaculate, I was amazed.

Over the years I've done a little trimming of wires, probably the THHN, 
possibly due to stretching, but my application did not require a ton of 
tension.

I think THHN might be my go-to wire for the rebuild.

-Steve K8LX

On 8/6/2017 16:49 PM, john at kk9a.com wrote:

> My question was what is the advantage of Flexweave over THHN. Both are 100% copper, Flexweave has significantly more strands which makes it more flexible but how much flexibility do you need. Is there a corrosion issue with so many strands? Yes THHN is not meant for exterior use, the outer nylon of THHN flakes off in a short time however the PVC coating seems to last for years even in a high UV environment. For decades I have used THHN for rotator wire. I used to use stranded copperweld wire for temporary dipoles. After many years the strands started breaking so I replaced the wire and the newer copperweld and it did the same thing after a year.  Apparently the wire quality was worse than my original and I quit using it.