TV aerial cable thickness

[iamchris]

I need to run TV aerial lead / coaxial from downstairs to the loft aerial. I see some cables used for this that care quite thick and hard to bend around corners and others that are a lot more flexible and seem a bit thinner. Is there any advantage to using one over the other?

Many thanks

 

[winston1]

Rule of thumb, the thicker the cable the less loss.
Best cable to use is type WF100. With any cable don’t bend it sharply round corners.

 

[Iamchamps]

Difference in quality with the thinner normally being a lower quality and will lose more signal over distance and have not so good shielding from interference I.e if running near power.

 

[Lucid]

As a rough rule of thumb for TV and satellite coax, I tend to work with the cable diameter and then multiply by 12 to get the minimum bend diameter. WF100 is 6.8mm diameter (thickness), so that multiplied by 12 gives me 81.6mm, which is near enough to the official 80mm bend diameter as makes no difference.

The thinner coax you often see used for Sky installs is about 4.8mm diameter. 4.8 x 12 = 57.6mm bend diameter. The official bend diameter for CT63 or WF65 4mm coax is 50mm. Again, the rough rule of thumb gets close enough to make no real difference.

What @winston1 said about loss though is very important. Lets compare WF100 (a good quality all-copper coax) with the premium version of a 4.8mm coax. It's premium because it uses all copper and is made to verifiable standards. This cable is Webro WF65.

For TV aerial use, you'll be losing roughly 1.9dB of signal every 10m in WF100, and 3dB/10m in WF65. For a typical roof to lounge straight drop on an average terrace, semi or detached, I'd expect the cable run to be between 15 and 20m. The difference then amounts to 2dB, and in aerial terms that's not massively significant unless you're really struggling for signal. Personally, I'd rather not give away anything I don't have to, particularly as the single coax version of WF65 (if you can find it) is more expensive than WF100.

Here's the issue though...

The 2dB comparative loss is when comparing best against best. If you buy something that uses the silver-looking shielding instead then the gap could really get a lot bigger. Trying to get reliable specs from a vendor is a nightmare because very often they have no-one technical who understands this stuff. They sell on price and delivery, and leave you to worry about whether the product actually works properly.




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[Keithmac]

I used WF100 from loft to living room and it gave excellent results, all my "Signal Quality" is 100% reported by the TV.