Just this past weekend I stripped my low band tower (160 & 80) of all
wire and coax (it was an all day job, wore me out!), in preparation of
changing the basic design. As far as antenna wire I had a mixture of
solid copperweld, bare hard-drawn stranded, and black THHN.
This wire was up for 20 years at least.
The copperweld and bare stranded was all green, but mechanically sound.
As I recall the copperweld was a good variety with enough copper to not
expose the steel core - I saw no rust. It could be scraped and
re-soldered I think.
Oxidized stranded is more of a problem to clean and re-use if you want
to solder it. I suppose an acid bath of some sort might work - never
tried it.
The THHN looks immaculate, I was amazed.
Over the years I've done a little trimming of wires, probably the THHN,
possibly due to stretching, but my application did not require a ton of
tension.
I think THHN might be my go-to wire for the rebuild.
-Steve K8LX
On 8/6/2017 16:49 PM, john@kk9a.com wrote:
My question was what is the advantage of Flexweave over THHN. Both are 100%
copper, Flexweave has significantly more strands which makes it more flexible
but how much flexibility do you need. Is there a corrosion issue with so many
strands? Yes THHN is not meant for exterior use, the outer nylon of THHN flakes
off in a short time however the PVC coating seems to last for years even in a
high UV environment. For decades I have used THHN for rotator wire. I used to
use stranded copperweld wire for temporary dipoles. After many years the
strands started breaking so I replaced the wire and the newer copperweld and it
did the same thing after a year. Apparently the wire quality was worse than my
original and I quit using it.
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