[TowerTalk] Buried HF/VHF feedlines

[Jonathan - KE0YBL]

Thank you all for taking an interest in my project. To address a couple of the questions that were asked:
- I live in Minnesota - fairly cold.

- The valley I need to run through is known to have sitting water in the spring and the fall, and is probably saturating multiple feet down. I'm necessarily concerned with that (as you've all said, the cable is water-tight). This makes me hesitant to use any type of irrigation line (given ground saturation in that area). Presumably with SDR13.5 HDPE conduit, all I need to do with is temp differentials introducing condensation.

- I plan to have at least a couple runs of cable - not entirely sure I'll break things up yet, but it does increase the costs. Still waffling on that aspect a bit.

- I've not seen new costs near $2.40 that were mentioned by Jeff WN3A. Online sources I've seen appear to be nearly 2x that, which seems like a disparity. I'm in MN, bit too far to drive, but I'm open to alternative sources/shipping. I'm not sure the brand/specs on the cable my climber has. I know he regularly uses it on his own 2-way customers, but was reserved about details (perhaps un-intentionally).


Thanks,
Jonathan

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Saturday, July 25, 2020 12:17 PM, Rik van Riel <riel at surriel.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 2020-07-25 at 06:17 +0000, Jonathan - KE0YBL via TowerTalk
> wrote:
>
> > Herein lies the rub -- my climber's experience has been (and probably
> > yours as well) that directly burying this in our frozen tundra
> > eventually results in crushed cable through thawing and freezing. I'm
> > considering 3" or 4" HDPE conduit/innerduct to alleviate that, but
> > given I'll need to go through a valley, condensate will condensate in
> > the dip no matter what I do. I could perhaps drop the conduit down
> > 36+" deep to avoid the frost level, but it'll still be sitting in
> > water (albeit not frozen at that depth) without active moisture
> > management in the run (fan, nitrogen (ugh), whatever - not feasible).
>
> If you go with 4" irrigation pipe (schedule 80, I believe),
> the home improvement stores will sell you pipe segments that
> have holes in the side for water to drain out, and "socks"
> to put around the pipe so dirt doesn't get in.
>
> It would be easy enough
> to have some of the segments in the
> dip be ones that let water out.
>
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