I have a 2 meter long RG-174 pigtail that I bought on Ebay.
This is an unmarked cable with two BNC connectors in both ends.
I wanted preparing a choke by inserting a FT114-43 in the cable (14 turns). I cut one end to facilitate the winding process. When I removed the jacket I felt the shielding wasn’t as thick as it is present on some MIL spec coaxial.
This is what I expected to find (MIL spec):
I can see the interlaced external braid but it is less dense than I expected.
Sure this is gonna reduce the maximum useable frequency, but I intend to use it for 7 - 28 MHz qrp.
Do you think this situation will perform worse compared to a proper thick shielding?
73 Ignacio
It can be a problem indeed. It seems like the quality is very variable:
When buying on Ali, it’s better to test everything properly before use. They would do everything to make it cheaper, but most of the time it has a cost (in quality). Another example with those clip leads for, where they replaced copper wire with iron:
The somewhat thinned copper shield braid of the approximately 2 m long cable would still be usable as a connecting cable, but due to the very small bending radius when winding a 1.14" ferrite core, this braid becomes distributed very unevenly, which probably has a noticeably negative effect on the properties of the 1:1 balun.
