[TowerTalk] Introduction

[john at kk9a.com]

At my previous house I buried a line of CATV hardline to my tower for a
220MHz packet station. I damaged the first cable and had to be super careful
on my second attempt. Luckily the cable was free. The smooth wall aluminum
is no were near as tough as corrugated copper Heliax.

John KK9A


To:	towertalk <towertalk at contesting.com>
Subject:	Re: [TowerTalk] Introduction
From:	Steve Maki <lists at oakcom.org>
Date:	Sat, 4 Feb 2017 20:54:31 -0500
List-post:	<towertalk at contesting.com">mailto:towertalk at contesting.com>
Gary-Joe,

I'd say 99.5% of the installed 50 ohm hardline base (by footage) is copper.
Commscope tried their darndest to introduce their smoothwall hardline (both
copper and aluminum) to the cellular industry, but it never caught on. One
reason was that when you cut away the jacket to install a ground kit,
smoothwall cable becomes very fragile - not so with corrugated.

Commscope eventually gave up on that and purchased Andrew.

Of course smoothwall 75 ohm was always the standard in the cable TV game,
where they never needed to remove jacket except at the connectors.

-Steve K8LX