Exactly right. I had trouble with "critters" chewing my coax. Nothing bad happened until it rained. Then the rain got into the coax and the water interacted with the DC voltage on the coax; terrible noise. With the DC off, there was no noise even when soaked.
I converted the DC feed to CAT-5 cable and the problem disappeared. Another advantage of CAT-5 is that you get 8 conductors, all independent of the RF coax and the earth ground. Also, for whatever reason, critters don't like it :-) The RF coax was eventually stuffed thru 1,000 feet of cheap sprinkler pipe repurposed as "conduit". Good enough to keep the critters out and rain out. But I elected to keep the CAT-5 for DC. 73 Rick N6RK On 10/6/2020 3:09 PM, donov...@erols.com wrote:
Hi Lee, Your testing will be inconclusive unless you inject water into your connectors, or you could just move to Maryland where we get at least 45 inches of annual rainfall and it gets into everything thats not well waterproofed 73 Frank W3LPL
_________________ Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband Reflector