Looking at replacing some suspect cable at home, what’s the best Cat6 cable on a reel to get?
I second that.
If it’s patch cables, I love their SlimRun ones. They have enough colours that I have everything colour coded for the different networks at my house.
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Buy what you can get, cable is still in short supply. I’ve been buying from Cable and Kits for most things. But if I need outside rated cable, Homedepot and Lowes carry a cable that is supposed to be rated for outdoors as well as some direct burial cable.
As long as it’s not CCA (copper clad aluminum). Especially for longer runs.
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True enough, bad trend they started with that stuff. I’d have to look into how the signal propagates on the conductor, but I don’t think it is “skin effect” like you get with RF transmissions. We used to have a lot of steel core coax and when you got big enough it was copper tube for the center conductor because most frequencies I was working with were “skin effect”. The good coax was still solid copper center but much more expensive.
I don’t know who was the first to produce CCA cables, but that’s an ongoing problem. Education won’t prevent people willing to cut corners, and undercut competitors.
As an electrician, I am familiar with the skin effect (although we only have to deal with one frequency). It does play an important part when it comes to high voltage (particularly the way HV cables are constructed).
What I didn’t know (or at least remember), were copper tubes. Learn something new every day (which I enjoy).
@Greg_E Copper-clad aluminium wire - Wikipedia has a section specifically on the skin effect.
My google skills are dull today… On top of the racks are coax WMHT’s former analog transmitter – Engineering Radio
They use plastic spacers to keep the distance (and impedance) correct and a silver plated “bullet” inserted into the center tube to make the connection (flange for the shield). Part of this was to be able to pump dry nitrogen into the system to help prevent arcs from the very high current. But tubes were normal because the RF “flowed” on the skin so they didn’t need a solid center. I’m sure cost and weight figured into the design as well. The tuning was normally done in a waveguide as well as a giant “spring” inductor in the back of a rack, stretch or compress the spring, move some slugs in or out, rotate some taps in the waveguide. Neat stuff that is mostly now gone with the move to solid state transmitters. The waveguide to coax devices were neat too.
And yes, once in a while the bullets would arc and melt, this caused a massive headache, and normally in the middle of the night.