Coax Clean-up….
Last winter I undertook a huge project to clean up my radio desk. I’ve wrote about it before and if your curious, you can read about that project in this article. I’ve been very happy with the practical aspects of that clean up. When I had to move around the radio computer, it was pretty easy to-do and since then I’ve added a swing arm for the monitor.
One side effect of that project was a bunch of extra coax was no longer needed inside the shack and had since been shoved outside the house. (All of the coax goes through a four inch hole I drilled in the side of the house. I installed a set of dryer vents hoods to protect the hole and keep things dry)
All this extra coax was annoying to look at even for me and it was a major pain when I had to mow that side of the house. So this summer I decided to-do something about the coax runs from the shack to the antennas on the roof.
I had tried several different things to keep the mess of coax out of the way. Since I tend to grow antennas, I have ALOT of coax going into the house. At one point I had used special plastic speaker wire hooks to nail all the coax to the side of the house, where it runs vertical to the roof. This worked great until I need to move some of it or wanted to add another run of coax. In the recent tower work, I needed another couple feet of coax added to the run going to the HF beam, I know it was ‘available’,
but with the coax nailed to the side of the house, it was not available.
I also had these ladder hooks attached to the side of the house where the coax ran horizontal from the point it came off the roof to the entry point into the shack. This was actually my first attempt at coax management and wasn’t a bad idea. The problem is that the coax druped between each hook and it looked bad. So my coax clean up needed to accomplish three simple things.
1. Find a way to clean up the vertical run of coax up from the ground to the roof, which allows for new runs to be added easily and slack can be moved. It should also have something pull it back against the house, so it isn’t hanging out a couple feet.
2. Do the same thing with the horizontal run of coax, but also keep the run pulled up tight as it goes from each ladder hook.
3. Find some easy place to ‘put’ all the slack coax, so it is out of the way and also available. This should ideally be located behind the fence, so it isn’t visible from the street.
I attacked the horizontal problem first.
I had previously tried to creating a coax tray using 4 inch PVC pipe. But this hadn’t worked at all, for some reason it wouldn’t hold paint and it always filled up with water. So this time I wondered the isles at Home Depot and came up with a slightly different approach. To create an attach point, I got two eight foot runs of 1 1/4 PVC pipe and two wooden dowels which just fit inside the PVC. I also bought some black paint, which was made to work on plastic like the PVC pipe. A couple of screws kept the dowels inside the pipe and when laid across the ladder hooks, I had a nice solid platform to attach stuff. The pipes overlapped in the middle by about 1.5 feet, which was just prefect. To actually attach the coax to the pipe, I picked up a box of this little bungie cord things that are made for holding stuff like hoses. They wrap around cables or what ever and ‘tie’ off by putting this plastic ball through the end. I put one of these about every 1.5 feet and it works perfectly holding everything up nice and neat. I’ve already had to add another run of coax since doing this and it is super easy.
I decided to use the same little bungie cords for the vertical run up the side of the house. After I finished cleaning up the mess of coax on the ground, it only took 30 minutes on the latter tying up the coax running to the roof. I used a couple of the previously mentioned plastic hooks and some longer bungie cords to attach the whole mess to the side of the house. (One a the top, one about half way down and another at the ground level)
The biggest problem was cleaning up the rats nest of slack coax that had all been moved to the ground, just below the vertical run to the roof. 
I had managed to find the couple extra feet needed for the HF beam and also the couple extra feet I needed for the tri-band vertical. I think in general I came up with about six feet of extra coax on nearly every run. In some cases it was quite a bit more then six feet, but it was all wrapped around itself. So one afternoon I attacked the large puzzle and turned the mess of coax into a series of neat coils. Everything is now hung up off the ground and separated, so I can shift around the slack as needed.
I was lucky and never really noticed anything interfering with something else, so the same was still true when I got done. I tried to spread out the coils (as you can see from the picture), so all of them are not sitting on top of each other.
I’m quite happy with the result. It sure looks a lot nicer and if I need to move around antennas on the roof, I know getting that couple extra feet of coax won’t be a big deal.
C