"Richard Harrison" wrote in message
...
Ed Price wrote:
"Remember to use hardware cloth for the screen."

In my experience, the screened room was constructed of copper insect
wire screen. All seams and joints were soldered.

As in pre-fab rooms, the room was double screened. Both sides of the
wooden studs were screened to make a copper box inside a copper box.

Every penetration was carefully screened and bypassed. The door was
shielded and had low resistance contacts all around.

We were able to accurately make very sensitive measurements in our
screened room which was sited in the center of a very high power
shortwave broadcast plant with many transmitters, usually simultaneously
operating in at least 3 bands. One band predicted as the optimum working
band for the path and, the same program simultaneously transmitted on
the next higher and next lower bands, just in case. We had several
languages and target areas at nearly all times during all 24-hour days.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI


The Lindgren "double-shielded" copper screen rooms may have had some
theoretical SE advantage over double-skin panels where the inner & outer
skins were joined at every clamp rail. OTOH, whatever advantage the design
might have had was, in practice, negated by the nearly doubling of
fasteners. The wood frames in those copper mesh screen rooms were notorious
for changing dimension due to atmospheric humidity, resulting in a
"breathing" effect that worked to loosen all those fasteners. A periodic
re-torque of all fasteners was advisable.

Since you went to the extra effort to solder all your seams (the floor seams
too g), you created a considerably better than average screen room. My
comment about hardware cloth being soldered at each crossover was meant to
point out that the copper screen isn't bonded that way. (For one thing, the
small wire spacing would create enough surface tension in molten solder or
zinc to completely fill the holes, so it would be rather hard to create
wire-to-wire crossover bonds without resulting in a solid sheet.)

In my experience, new screen rooms, with bright & shiny copper screen, can
yield an 80 dB SE or better. But, after a couple of years exposure to
atmospheric oxygen, the copper forms a decent layer of copper oxide
(remember, the wire cross-overs are not gas tight), and the SE degrades by
20 to 30 dB. (This is independent of the clamped or soldered panel seams.) I
haven't found any practical way to reverse this degradation.

If you have a very-used screen room (like one that's been stored on pallets
for a few [dozen?] years), you will see that the screen is very oxidized.
The best you can do when assembling this old room is to scrupulously buff
the panel clamping areas until the copper shines again. (This is delicate,
get too aggressive, and you will tear the screening!) I once tried to merge
two mid-size, old double-shielded screen rooms, by soldering the merge line
with a patch of new copper screen. This was horribly labor intensive, as
cleaning the old copper screen well enough to flow the solder was really
tough. Trying to solder over your head is also an experience to avoid at all
costs.

Also, about the "door with low resistance contacts." The copper screen rooms
usually are not strong and rigid enough to properly maintain perfect
alignment of the heavy door leaf. You need to periodically check the contact
action of the (typically) beryllium copper fingerstock. Look for shiny rub
marks on the mating frame surface. Very well designed modular rooms will use
a heavy, solid frame to carry the door leaf. Another factor is the heavy
mechanical loading of the door and frame compressing the long perimeter of
fingerstock. Unless well-built, both leaf and frame can bend under load,
giving you a poor low-impedance joint. Knife-edge doors are less of a
problem with compressive forces, but then, they need even more precise
alignment registration to work well.

Getting back to the OP, I thought that he was asking about a shield over
equipment, not a room volume. For HF, the 1/4" cloth will work as well as
copper screening, and will allow much better air circulation. As I pointed
out earlier, his biggest problem will be bonding the cloth to his heavy
aluminum plate chassis.


Ed
wb6wsn