About this episode
Foundations of Amateur Radio
One of the potentially trickier aspects of putting together your shack is connecting the radio to the antenna. On the face of it, the challenge is limited to making sure that you have mating connectors on both ends, but when you actually start implementing this you'll run into several other considerations.
The very first one as I said is the connector. Every amateur I've ever spoken to goes through the same process. You pick a connector, typically the one that your radio comes with, then you adapt the connector on your coaxial cable to suit, then you'll get an SWR meter, a dummy load, some testing gear, a coax switch or two, perhaps another radio, or an amplifier and along the way you'll discover that you now have a growing collection of connectors to choose from, and that's just the connectors inside the shack.
After considering connectors, you'll start to contemplate the coax itself. You'll likely weigh price against signal loss, but there are other aspects to the selection of the right coax for the job.
For example, how do you get the coax actually into the shack?
One of the main challenges associated with solving that problem is surprisingly something that rarely affects our hobby, other than any human factors associated with the phenomenon of "weather".
Getting coax into a shack generally involves passing through a weather proof barrier of some sort. In doing so, you're likely to create a place where the weather can make its way into places it's not supposed to.
Water can and will travel along your coax. Hopefully on the outside of it, but if you're unlucky, on the inside too, likely destroying it along the way. At first glance you'll think that water only travels down with gravity and in an ideal world you'd be right, but as it happens, water will happily do other things like get blown by the wind, or condensate in temperature gradients, like those found near a hole you just created in your lovely weather proof barrier.
If your shack has existing openings, they're generally the easiest to appropriate, things like gaps in the eves, existing vent holes, between roof tiles or sheet iron, plenty of existing places where you can get from inside to outside a shack. Note that this is also the case if your shack is a trestle table tucked away in an office, like mine.
Before I continue, I'm about to raise some potential safety issues, but I'm not an occupational health and safety professional, so, do your own due diligence.
If you do need to go into your roof space, height aside, consider it a dangerous place. Make sure that there's someone to check on you and consider alternatives to climbing up there. Wearing a face mask and full body clothing is a very good idea. Often you'll find exposed wires, deteriorating or toxic insulation and other nasty things, conductivity of steel roof frames and pipes are also a hazard, so be extremely reluctant to venture there. Avoidance is preferab
