Transmission1

Hi,

Hope this is the right place for posting this.

After many years of building my own antennas of all sorts, I have decided to buy the ScanKing royal discone RX 20-2000MHz. I live in a block of flats in London and for the last 22 years, I have had about 20 meters of RG213U running from the roof to my shack.
I usually scan both civil and Mil airband but am happy to scan or try to decode anything from kHz to GHz, so I wanted to find out what you think about RG213U which seems to have an upper limit of 1GHz, and if a change of cable to an expensive cable like LMR400 would be really beneficial.
I would like to scan up to 6GHz with my HackRF, the councils seem to have their video links around the upper end of 5GHz (most likely encrypted).
I am also thinking of placing an LNA at the antenna which may remove the need for the new coax and compensate for the cable loss.
Since I will have to put up a proper mast I also got myself a 4-way electronics RF switch and an 18GHz RF relay, so I may experiment with placing some other GHz antennas and switch them into my coax.
So a bit of a project, I dont particularly want to spend a lot of money on a coaxial cable that it may not make much of a difference or if an LNA would fix it, so I am open to your suggestions and pointers.

Thanks,

Get quality sat coax.

Isnt sat coax 70 Ohm?
Any particular one in mind?

75 Ohm. Doesn't matter if we talk RX only.

Yeah been reading about that, especially on a scanner.
What do you use, RG6 or better?

For my RX antennas I use Triset cable. It's used to connect satellite dish with receiver here.

Thanks, looking at the specs for your cable and my existing one, its very little difference. Your cable seems to have less capacitance which makes it slightly better at higher frequencies and it shows in the specs. In fact, Triset 113 seems to have identical specs as RG6 which is used for the same thing here.

I use CT100 for all my RX antennas. It's good to a couple of gigs and it's flexible and easy to work with. Double screened (foil and loose weave). As it's intended for satellite it's a 7mm cable so I fit an F-connector and adapt as necessary.

Thanks Andy.