[TowerTalk] Coax Life Expectancy

[Jim Brown]

On 2/14/2023 9:52 PM, Grant Saviers wrote:
> Best to measure is old coax is what I learned.

YES! VE0JS gave me some marine coax, in return for me helping her with 
RFI issues (and giving her a lot of cores) for her boat on which she has 
now made four unassisted circumnavigations of the earth (two of them 
shipwrecked near the end). She is the ballsiest lady I have ever met. In 
her 70s, when a storm caused her wind generator to hit the deck, she 
climbed the mast to restore it. On her most recent trip, she recovered 
from nearly capsizing to finish. W6OAT, NI6T, and I made many QSOs with 
her through the South Ocean on SSB at the latitudes of Crozet on 40M. 
She was using an ICOM marine rig that had NO audio processing, loading 
the backstay, with classically correct connection to the water as a 
counterpoise.

Rusty, Garry, and I joined her for wine on the boat when she visited 
Santa Cruz and Sausalito after her first successful trip. Check out her 
qrz.com page -- the 2019 trip was her second successful trip. When we 
visited with her after her first, we observed as she very sensitively 
mentored the teen-age daughter of a Santa Cruz local who had supported 
her trip.

That marine coax looked fine, but it measured as lousy quality. It went 
in the trash.

73, Jim K9YC