Is coax better than ladder?

As long as an antenna tuner is used, ladder line offers some compelling advantages compared with coaxial cable in almost any medium- or high-frequency application. This is particularly true when you want multiband operation with a single antenna.

What coax should I use for HF?

Steren 205-700 – Best Overall Coax For HF Ham Radio It is a male to male (UHF to UHF) connector with an advanced coaxial capacity, developed from RG-58 to RG -8X. Users find this cable useful enough, as it is highly magnetic. Ham radio users have no issues sending signals with this cable because it works well with VHF.

What is ladder line coax?

The ladder line baluns are designed for balanced output and are generally used at the end of a run of ladder line from the antenna. The baluns connect to the ladder line and then transition to coax cable to you antenna tuner or radio station.

What is the impedance of ladder line?

Ladder line may also be manufactured or DIY-constructed as “open wire line” consisting of two parallel wires featuring widely spaced plastic or ceramic insulating bars and having a characteristic impedance of 600 ohms or more.

Why is ladder line low loss?

It is well understood in the amateur radio community that ladder line, window line, etc. have lower losses per foot than say RG-213 or LMR400, particularly on HF frequencies. It is also understood that this loss is a function of the RF resistance of the conductors.

Which is better rg8u or RG8X?

Changing the able to RG-8X drops the loss to 4.5 dB, which is only a minor improvement. (4.5 dB loss corresponds to 36\% of the power makes it through.) However, using RG-8U type cable decreases the loss to 2.4 dB (58\% of the power makes it through the cable), so clearly the larger cable size has an advantage.

Is RG-8X good for HF?

Remember that RG-8X was designed for HF use where the extra weight of RG-8 could cause wire dipoles to sag, stretch, and change resonant frequency. RG-8X is smaller, lighter, but still handled the power levels common for wire dipoles (it won’t handle full power, but most ham stations don’t run full power).

What is the length of ladder line?

Your dipole is cut for 40 meters or about 66 feet total length and you feed it with ladder line to a tuner to make it a multibander….

160 meter dipole	35-60, 170-195 or 210-235 feet	(Avoid 130, 260 ft)
40 meter dipole	42-52, 73-83, 112-123 or 145-155 feet	(Avoid 32, 64, 96, 128 ft)

Is RG8U good for VHF?

Lower loss cable like RG-8U is great for 50-75 foot runs in the VHF/UHF range. It is reasonably affordable and easy to work with. Most ham radio stores or online merchants like The Wireman or Cable Xperts carry RG-8U.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9KmsGnijQ