A few months ago I had ideas of repositioning my raspberry pi to the small telescope shed located at the base of my mast/pole in order to reduce the length of my coax feed. I have mains power and ethernet cable connection here. However due to various factors I never got round to implementing this. I have recently read about someone that has his dongle at the top of the mast then a long usb (10m) to the Pi which is connected to the internet. This would do away with my 30+meter length of coax. The coax is westflex 103 and the losses are not particularly high but any gain of reception would be appreciated. So my question is, is this feasible, is the 10m usb lead too long and would the dongle need to be in a metal screened cover? Any comments appreciated.
Hi there,
Just yesterday i implemented what you are describing with very good results and improvement of my reception.
In my case the USB cable is 8m and the dongle is just siting under the antenna.
My construction is based on a coaxial collinear 8 element antenna made of RG6 TV cable and a short 20cm RG174U cable feeding the USB donlge.
Initialy when i decided to install the new setup i had vast deterioration of my reception (worst than before with the 5m cable running from antenna to dongle) so i started experimenting.
The box in which i keep my dongle is a plastic one, not shielded so i made a simple experiment.
I got aluminum foil wraped arround the box in order to isolate it from any interefence and suddently i got my range launched from 120 to 260miles and my messages/sec from 12-35 to 203!!!
Good morning.
Thanks for the reply. I will certainly give it a go based on your results. I am hoping that the dongle I have will fit inside the antenna bottom mounting pole (aluminium) and to use an adaptor (nplug sma) and directly connect it. Need to order the bits and hopefully do it next weekend when I will post my progress.
Thanks again - very nice diagram. Let you know how it works out.
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