Preparing for Antenna and Cable While Building Your Home!
Preparing for Antenna and Cable While Building Your Home!
Most of the Radio Amateurs globally face problem regarding the installation of antenna and cable for Ham Radio. In some regions there are strict restrictions for placing any type of antennas. I have read of some Hams who have bought extra land and building in distant areas where there are no restrictions and operate their radio remotely! Of course some have remote operations in another grid for the sake of awards. I have also heard that many in Europe prefer outdoor operations in open spaces because of strict restrictions on installing antennas at their city home.
I was thinking that when you book your apartment, you could put access to terrace for antenna as a criteria! During that stage the builder is likely to accept, I presume. If you could have a built in duct for a hardline coaxial cable as well, it is excellent! As you may be aware, hardline coaxial cable is quite thick, about an inch, and with little flexibility and expensive. But the advantage is that it has low external noise pick up and loss per meter of cable is low compared to thinner coaxial cable. You won’t be able to bend a hardline cable at right angles to pass through a duct. Hardline is quite useful at higher frequencies like UHF and above for satellite operations, especially if more distance is there from the radio and the antenna. A patch cable of more flexibility will be needed at the radio end to prevent the radio being half floating due to the stiff cable. Right angled connector adaptors are also needed somethimes.
Even if you plan while building your own home, things could change later. I had placed a vertical hollow galvanized iron pipe on my home at the level of the first floor roof on a ledge on the way to my water tank. I could keep a GI pipe inserted into it for holding my 7 element VHF beam antenna, at that time, about quarter century back. The result was that I could hear even a VHF repeater located 300 km away sometimes, even though my home is located on low elevation. But adding a quarter century to my age now, prevents me from accessing the location for any antenna work on that unprotected narrow ledge! I have shifted all my antenna experiments to my first floor terrace which is easily accessible and well protected with fencing all aroud. End result is that I can easily access a new repeater located at just 30 km and very rarely one at 120 km. Moreover, globaly warming seem to have increased the frequency of thunder storms, making us more scared of placing high rise antennas. Or is it the age factor which makes us more scared?
Similar mismatch between planning and execution can occur in other ways as well. One VU ham asked the builder to place a PVC conduit for bringing down a hardline coaxial cable down from the terrace. But the builder used a thinner pipe. End result is that he struggled to bring even an ordinary coaxial cable down through the conduit and had to resort to external path for the cable system. Another option in such situations is to use more flexible types of cables. It is mentioned that LMR 400/600 ultraflex series are more flexible because they use stranded central conductor instead of the usual solid one. Hence they are easier to handle and can be routed through pipes more easily. It has also been mentioned that N type connectors are preferred over the usual SO 239/PL 259 combination for frequencies at UHF and above. I am extremely thankful to the members of our local LEO Satellite Repeater Contact group who gave me these valuable insights during the discussion today morning! This is a tiny effort to document it for future use.