i have an 18' coax cable and it reaches the location of the cb, but its all out in the cab. i have no carpet, so i want to route it through the padding on the roll bars. thus said, does it matter the length of the additional coax? can i just add 9'?

tia.

-mikey

 

Depends how you plan on adding the length. I've never seen a fitting is configured such that it adapts from terminal (the end that would have attached to the radio), to a female "coupler".
If you plan on soldering on an extension, care must be taken to keep the shielding all around the inner core. This keeps the interference away from the inner core, where the signal is carried, both outgoing (transmit) and incoming (recieve).
It may be cheaper to purchase a new, longer cable. No cuts, no repairs. Cable is cheap. Fittings are usually expensive. JMHO.

 

If by this you mean soldering a piece of RF cabling to a second piece to make it longer--this is not a viable option. The impedance lump presented by such a haphazard approach would clobber SWR. Either use proper RF connectors (which can be found, but the price may be high as you allude), or use a full length of one run of coax. If all else fails, you can solder two PL-259s, then use a "barrel connector" (fairly common adapter) to connect the two pieces. But, the best option because it gives the best performance in transmit and in receive is a full run of one length of cable with minimum connectors.

Speaking of cable: There's cable then there's cable. If you're fabricating this from scratch, buy good stuff. If you can see the white phenolic easily through the outer shielding, just say no. Unfortunately, many of the pre-made cables are very poor quality coax. Buy coax in which the shielding fully encloses the dielectric between the shield and the center conductor.

 

I second that......rather than using a barrel connector, it would be far better to just run a longer coax.....less chance of having another soldering job work loose. And yes, get some good coax....I forget exactly what it's called but I think it was RG8X, or Mini 8, was always good stuff.

 

ok, so how about this: hXXp://www.walcottcb.com/procomm-30-coax-cable-removeable-pl259-308xn13-p-1086.html?cPath=28_355_437

will i have issues with the longer length? every where i look it seems that if you dont use an 18' coax you will have issues with something.

 

Well...you really don't want to go much less, but it's ok to go longer.....to an extent. BUT..30' is a bit much. Remember, there is a thing called "line loss", meaning, in a nutshell, the longer the coax you go, the more the signal is sucked up by the coax rather than to the antenna. And in small/cheap coax it can happen fast. That's why us HAM ops usually use the spendy big stuff or even, what they call, Hard Line. Minimal line loss at given frequencies. If I were you I'd just figure exactly what you need and if you don't want to solder the connectors yourself, I'm sure there's a electronic shop that will do it for you.

 

I would suggest Belden..

 

Shop around before buying anything from walcottt cb, you can usually do better price wise.....

 

What about using the 30' and cut as needed?

 

Well......yeah, but he might have a hard time hiding that big ol' barrel connector in a certain place. So why not get just what he needs of some good Belden and be done with it? Sure 30 feet would be "ok", I was also just tryin to keep the guy from having to hide and extra 10' of cable if he only needs 20'. Besides, cheap coax sucks, even if it is just CB.....try bending that crap around a sharp corner and all kinds of things can happen.