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Installing a Ladder Line to the house
On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 14:00:43 -0800 (PST), James barrett
wrote: I've read some Q&A about ladder line and I didn't see exactly my question. I want to run 450 ohm ladder line into the house. my tuner has a built-in balun for a ladder line so I think I can just run the ladder line all the way to the tuner. How do I physically attach the ladder line to the house? All I can think of is to nail it right through the spacers onto the side of the house. But I don't know if the nails will interfere with transmission at all. A second that comes to mind when considering this setup: if I run the ladder line all the way to the tuner, how do I ground it? Thanks, kb1odg James, You don't mention whether your antenna is resonant or not. Nor do you mention where your feed line enters the house. I use 600 ohm ladder line to feed my 220 foot dipole from Antenna tuner to Ten Tec L Tuner located near a basement window. There are a number of problems that I have solved since my antenna is between two trees about 300 feet apart. I support it using Dacron rope at both ends. One end is fixed. the other goes through a pulley to a 40 lb sealed box of cat litter. This helps to prevent the destruction of the antenna by wind- whipped trees. The antenna may be overkill: #10 copperweld and W7FY feed line. However, 40 lbs does not keep the antenna from flexing +-6-8 feet.. You need spring action of some sort to prevent the feed line from being ripped loose from the house or point to which it is first attached. I use plain string/twine to make an attachment from house to a spreader in the line. The string is adjusted so that the line is straight to the point where the string is attached to the house entry point and so that the line above where the string is attached is "draped" providing the ability for the antenna to go up or down 6-8 feet from its normal position. Under NE ice conditions it does drop that much and in high winds it can go up the 8 feet. I bring the line into the house through a basement window in which a Plexiglas insert has feed through insulators for external ground and the feed line. The string limits tension and flex on those insulators. Feed line from the insulators goes to the tuner when operating and to ground when not. There are feed line lightning arrestors that use spark plugs as grounding elements. I have not used these as I am worried that standing wave voltage nodes that I have on the line might trigger the spark plugs when running high power since I use the antenna from 160-10 on CW and SSB. If you have questions about my arrangement, I'll be happy to try to answer them. Ed, N5EI |
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