> I have recently replaced some "RG-6" in use for maybe seven or eight > years. > I opened it up to see what was happening. The degree of oxidation on the > inside and outside of the foil was perplexing. One could easily draw a > thumbnail along either side and build up a little pile of oxide. The foil > itself had become very brittle. It had been "sealed" and treated outside.
Use flooded cable outside. > If Jim says the shielding needs help when it's new, there's not much hope > for some varieties when it gets old. Another reason not to use anything > other than the flooded variety. Particularly so for someone who can look > at the ocean. I'm hundreds of miles from salt air. Would need to go with > flooded for sure close to the ocean. CATV F-6 or F59 cables are great for 160, or any HF band use. I use ten's of thousands of feet of the stuff, much of which has been installed in the early 2000's. My trunk cables are primarily flooded hardline, stepping down to F-11 style (F does NOT mean flooded, it is for F connectors) flooded cables for distribution, although some F-11 runs are thousands of feet. The longest run of F11 is about 3000 feet, and it is dead quiet when terminated. I have measurements on my webpage of F11 excited by overhead dipoles, and I can say with 100% certainty any claims of meaningful shield leakage are simply not factual. The same is true of smaller F6 cables. The only potential worriesome issues I have seen are lightning melting shields. This happens when ground loops create large strike currents in the shields. For example, when my towers get a hard whack from a superbolt, the common mode current can follow trunks out to my vertical array. That array has eight 150-foot buried radials on each of eight elements, and currents that massive wide-area ground will occasionally melt a shield on F-6 cables. Other than that, Racoons, and mowers, F6 through F11 has been flawless. This is true in working systems and in actual measurements. 73 Tom _______________________________________________ UR RST IS ... ... ..9 QSB QSB - hw? BK
