Long run 450 ohm ladder line
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| Sep 11th 2014, 13:05 | |
KJ5GYTotal Topics: 0 Total Posts: 0 |
I moved to south central Kentucky from south Louisiana and wanting to set up a station again. My shack is now located near the entrance of my property near overhead power lines at approximately 562' agl and is surrounded by ridges. The only place I can feasibly install antennas is on the south ridge approximately 1000' south east of the shack which will give me about 780' agl. Because of cost and line loss i am wanting to use 450 ohm window line but I am not sure it this will work. I have tried to find info on this subject but found very little. Can someone point me int the right direction. I also would like to have multiple antennas and cannot find any design info for a remote switching device for ladder line, only coax. Thanks, New Hillbilly Ham KJ5GY |
| Sep 12th 2014, 13:09 | |
W1VTSuper Moderator Total Topics: 0 Total Posts: 0 |
Remote switching of ladder line is possible, but only if you run QRP, are very lucky, or carefully engineer your system to insure that the voltages are kept low at the switching points. For many hams, the most practical approach may be to switch antennas using a 50 ohm coaxial switch located near the antennas. 1000' window line is likely to have 2 or 3 dB of loss on 20M, pehaps more in wet weather. You can cut than to less than a dB by using open wire instead of window line. With this much line loss, you don't really want to run a high SWR, as the losses will become excessive, just like they do when you run moderate lengths of coax with a high SWR. http://www.qth.com/ka9fox/open_wire.txt Here is a summary on using long runs of open wire. Zack Lau W1VT ARRL Senior Lab Engineer |
| Sep 12th 2014, 18:10 | |
KJ5GYTotal Topics: 0 Total Posts: 0 |
Thanks for the reply although it is not really what I wanted to hear. I will be doing a lot more reading to see more options. things would not be so problematic if I were not in a valley closely surrounded by ridges. One thing I miss about Louisiana is that there was nothing in the way of my signal. Thanks |
| Jan 14th 2015, 16:16 | |
KE4ZDJTotal Topics: 0 Total Posts: 0 |
Just scanning the forums and came across your post about long runs of ladder line. I live in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and am also surrounded by high ridges. I have a 1000' run of 450 ohm ladder line back to the ridge and feed it directly to a 80 meter full wave loop. At the house it runs into a 4:1 balun with a short piece of coax into the house to the tuner. This setup works very well for me. I have an 80 meter dipole strung in the trees down here at the house and I can work stations from the ridge top antenna that i cannot hear on the dipole. |
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