Ian’s Cave is an unintentional but very effective Faraday Cage. It has so much mesh and is so thoroughly grounded that no electronic signal can penetrate in either direction. If you’re working inside or in the front yard, where the mound blocks all signal, you’d better have a signal booster if you want your smartphone to work at anything but playing recorded music.
And until lately, the Cave had a signal booster. It didn’t work great, not as well as the one on the Lair, but it worked.
Until lately. And it didn’t take me very long to diagnose the failure…
Notice that there’s no coax on that antenna housing? Yeah, that’s because the wire that connected everything together in the housing just fell out. No phone, no pool, no pets.
I spend a fairly substantial amount of time working in and around Ian’s Cave, and I like my smartphone, so it was incumbent on me to fix or replace the booster. Happily I have gained some experience with installing them thanks to the one Big Brother bought me going on five years ago. Not that there’s really anything to it. But I did have serious doubts that I was going to be able to handle that threaded pipe mast by myself.
I won’t say it wasn’t any problem, but I got it done. Then it was just a matter of fishing new coax through the conduit, and…
…connecting some simple components inside the Cave.
Tested the connection with my phone, and…
Yup, it works again. I was pleased with myself, and that I found something useful to do with this unbelievable mild spell we’re enjoying. Sweating in a t-shirt in early February! This has to be some sort of record.
I was also sweating in my t-shirt. Although it was under a long-sleeved flannel shirt and a sweater and a vest and hooded winter coat.
You’re sweating in a tee shirt while I spent a half hour taking care of the latest 8 inch dump of snow. TANJ!
Congrats!! That was an important fix.
Why did the coax fall out?
Single crappy connection broke, possibly due to wind over a long time. Might have lasted if Ian had taped the coax to the mast.
Indeed. Any cable coming from a piece of equipment needs a proper strain relief, even if it’s just duct tape. Connectors alone are never designed to take any kinds of loads.
I use UV-resistant zip ties (multiple) on mast cables. And even if the wiring is inside a pipe, it needs to have some kind of collet-thing to take the load of the cable weight under gravity, inside the pipe.