Chuck Hutton wrote: > For short distances, go to Home Depot and get the (usually) gray plastic > conduit that is used to run outdoor wiring. Then bury your coax without > worrying about it being direct burial or not.
Just doing a quick Google on CATV hardline pricing... It looks like .500 PE jacketed and flooded aluminum CATV hardline is going for about $0.65 per foot. (This is cheaper than what questionable quality quad-shield direct burial stuff I've Googled.) It's probably cheaper than burying some PVC pipe and pulling non-flooded cable through it. Without the flooding compound between the jacket and the shield, you can't control condensation and water ingress, and you'll have that in an underground installation as the non-flooded cable breathes with temperature changes. Although with the PVC at least you can fish new cable in at any time without digging up the yard. I'd still pull in flooded cable if you went the PVC pipe route. Flooding compound is a sticky goo that prevents water from getting into the cable even with a jacket cut and prevents water movement. The down side with the CATV hardline is that you need a jacket removal tool, coring tool, and center conductor cleaning tool. (Cable Prep is my favorite brand.) And these are specific to any cable size, so tools for .500 won't work on .750, etc. But once you have them,they last a long time, and aren't expensive. The good thing about .500 cable is that not many CATV systems still use it, so you can pretty well scrounge connectors, splices, adapters, and reuse them and get cut-offs, ends of rolls, and tear outs cheap from your local cable system's cable scrap yard. And since there is only a thin copper coating over the aluminum center conductor of aluminum hardline, the aluminum stuff isn't exactly a hot commodity with copper recyclers yet. Jacketed and flooded aluminum hardline is a lot easier to handle than rolled PVC, but not quite as easy as jointed PVC, though you'll eventually have leaks with jointed PVC as the ground shifts. I think if I were there, I'd want to do a quick test with an antenna-end sleeve-type choke (leaving your plastic box and existing matching transformer as is) and see what happens with the existing cable before I got to doing anything else. Rick Kunath _______________________________________________ IRCA mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: [email protected]
