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I was going to stay out of this fight,but it has just gotten too silly.
So;"Can twisted wire replace shielded wire?" The simple answer is yes. But there is a big BUT. In a very quite RF locaiton, like the middle of the woods where there are no electric/phone/CATV lines, no TVs, no motors, no flourescent lamps a "twisted pair" can work ery well. Slightly lower losses, but my experiments in such a RF quite locaiton show no practical or detectable effects for LF through F (say 50KHz through 30MHz). If you have any RF noise sources, in many cases this will include your receiver as many modern recievers have some (to a lot) of RFI potiential, you will need to reduce the noise that gets into/onto your signal. Balanced open wire, AKA "ladder line" is better then twisted pair as far as line losses are concerend. But open line is more susceptable to ingress unless great care is taken to keep it well away from "anything" that will cause imbalance. Sadly the "anything" really means anything. At LF through HF the effects aren't all that important. A trick I learned back in the days of tall towers for VHF an UHF TV antennas was to put a 1 twist per foot in the twinlead. This often greatly reduced ghosting from very bad to not visible. So back to the orignal question: "Can twisted wire replace shielded wire?" Yes, under the right conditions. But in the real world, at least where I live, Coax, or Twinax or Triax, is much better because it reduces any additional noise I could pick up as my lead in leaves the antenna and reaches my receiver. I have used common twisted "bell" wire when I didn't have coax and if the location was quite, it worked great. The real question is not can twisted wire be used, but how well can you isolate twisted or parallel(think lamp cord) from your noise generators. It can be done, but coax is a lot easier to keep quite. I have enough RF noise that I can't reduce, there is no way I want to add any more RF crud to my 1uV signals. Terry |
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