What co-ax for masthead VHF?

[Spirit28]

Mate of mine is a radio tech & looks after a number of land based marine VHF repeater sites for the orginisation I work for around the coast.

On my old boat, I relocated the antenna to the top of the mast & he had a heap of Belden 8214 - rg8/u sitting on top of his workshop left over from some job. Seemed lighter and more flexible than the RG213 I was orginally going to use. There was a vast performance improvement over the stern mounted 6' whip.

Current boat has the antenna (2' Stainless whip) mounted inside the hull right down the stern (along with the old magnavox transit sat nav antenna - The main unit is still installed in the nav area and powers up - no fixes though!! Makes a good talking point over a few beers - newbies still can't grasp that you could go hours without a fix and the log & fluxgate fed into it to keep a DR - but I digress) as was the fashion with racing boats from the 80's to reduce windage & stop runners etc getting fouled. Relocation to the top of the mast is on the list of things to do when the rig is out next - god knows when that will be though.

The suprising thing is that is works really well - go figure!

[fairbank56]

Belden 8214 is lighter and more flexible because it has a foam dielectric, which is ok as long as you know how to properly weatherproof your connections.

Eric