I just bought a 21 ft antenna mast/tripod and I realized, I have no idea how long of a piece of coax I can run to my 5.8 Ghz VRx from my helical and patch antennas without a signal loss! Any advice?
Also, what type of coax? RG-316, RG405, something else? The antennas have SMA connectors and I am using Lawmate receivers.
Should have asked first!
You might get too much signal attenuation running long coax to your antennas. You'd be better off putting your vrx on top of the mast with the antennas, and running a long AV cable down to your ground station viewing equipment.
Far better is it to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure; than to take rank with those who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
The loss per foot at 5.8Ghz is pretty significant, exact numbers escape me right now but whatever it is, 21 feet is probably going to prove to be too long a distance even if you get the best coax money can buy.
Do what aeryck said
If you find that your video looks dimmer with a long AV cable, you can get a video amplifier/splitter that can boost the signal back up (and give you 4 video outputs from one input, to boot). Long cables will have loss, but it's much easier to manage on the AV cable side of things than the coax side. You mentioned two antennas; are you running a diversity setup? If so you may have to run two long AV cables, one for each receiver, and keep the diversity unit on the ground.
Far better is it to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure; than to take rank with those who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
Thanks guys!
I thought that might be a problem, I'll just do like you said and run long AV wires.
yup, long A/V wires. put the rx and tx up a pole. my video cable is a 25' cable i bought in k-mart at the turn of the century for a car-PC project.
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