Antenna cable selection
 

I will be mounting a directional HDTV antenna at a height of 90 feet on a tower. I would welcome suggestions on the best cable to use.

RG6?
RG11?

Thank you!

Mark

Do you know how long your total cable run will be? And have you figured out how much signal loss you can tolerate?

Tv antennas and Tv reception
 

RG-11 has less signal loss then RG-6. So RG-11 is better. If you will like to have more evaluation then make a tvfool radar report using Exact Address.

My best guess on the length of the cable run is about 220 feet (90' on the tower, 40' to the building and 90' inside the building to the existing splitter where the cable lead enters the building from the street. I plan to place an A/B switch there. The purpose is for redundancy when the cable system goes down in storms, etc. The antenna will continue to supply a tv feed for our town's emergency operations center at our police department. I'm unsure about calculating signal loss. The existing cable system feeds seven tv sets in the building.

Given the nature of your system, I would suggest you use RG-11. For design purposes, allow for 5 dB loss per 100'. (If you are also using RG-6 in some parts of the system, allow for 6.5 dB loss per 100'.) Quality passive splitters will almost always be labeled with the per-port loss value. An 8-way splitter would be expected to have about 10 to 12 dB loss.

All of these individual component losses can simply be added to give you the expected loss between the antenna and a given tuner.

The gain of the antenna will overcome loss elsewhere in the system. A preamplifier or distribution amplifier may be appropriate under certain circumstances. We would need to see the TV Fool signal prediction for your location to know if an amplifier would be appropriate.