I have a friend who is wanting to set up a CB radio in his house. Mine is on my back porch, as depicted in the video I posted in the other topic, but he lives in a valley that is really narrow, and in my experience helping set up antennas for other people, narrow valleys like that hamper you a lot. My mom set one up in her front yard in a valley about that size, and she just barely makes it to me from less than 3 miles away. So in order to get up and over the mountain-sides he wants to run coax up the side of the hill for about 450 feet. Several people around here have gotten some left-over TV cable from the cable company for dirt cheap when they run new lines (big thick stuff about the size of your thumb), and they'll run 50 feet of RG8U into their radio, and 50 feet into the antenna, but they'll put that thick stuff in the middle, and they get good results. The problem is I don't think the cable company has any extra laying around for sale, and since it's just a couple hundred feet instead of a couple thousand like some of the guys who use that hardline, we're thinking of just buying a big 500 foot roll of RG8X or RG8U and rolling out what we need and keeping the rest for spare jumpers, etc. Would RG8X or RG8U be OK to use for a run this long? Would there be any serious loss? RG8X obviously is cheaper, so if it would work alright we'd like to stick with that.
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