[Chris Siz]

On Sat 03 May 2008 11:10:02, Don Pearce wrote:

On Sat, 03 May 2008 10:58:27 +0100, Chris Siz
wrote:

I am in the UK and have a 10m length of some cheap TV aerial coax.
It came from a discount store as a TV coax extension cable. I
measure the cable diameter as 4.8mm.

(1) Is it ok to use this sort of coax for a microphone? I don't
want an impaired audio signal. The length I need to use is 3 to 4
metres.

(2) Is it ok for UHF TV or is it actually quite low grade coax and
prone to interference or mess up the aerial signal?

If you can get hold of some better cable do so. You have two
problems here - first coax isn't balanced, which is sort of bad
news for tiny signals such as you get from a mic. And secondly, to
compound that, if you strip back a little of the outer sheath, you
will find that the screen is 90% holes - in other words, the cable
is just about unscreened.


Um, yes. It is exactly like that. I had thought maybe they were using
very thin wires and that way getting a reasonable amount of physcial
screening but the wires I found were so sparse that it must be more
like what you describe!

As for using it for UHF TV, go ahead - that is what it is meant
for, and 10 meters is just about the maximum run length before you
need to think about using something better.

d