Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently I spent some time discussing the losses associated with connectors between your radio and your antenna. The traditional wisdom, and I use the word "wisdom" ironically, says that each connector introduces loss into the feed line. There is an understanding that the more connectors you have the worse it is and the more loss you have. Jim W6LG did the test, connected up 30 odd connectors and measured. His measurements were done on 14 MHz and on 50 MHz, using 50 microvolts and 1 kilowatt. No discernible difference. Of course after I mentioned this out loud the questions started. Why didn't he test this at a usable frequency, something like 145 MHz, or in the GHz band? Then there were those who said that this wasn't a real test and that it should be tested with coax in between the connectors. I discussed this all at some length and one idea we had was that perhaps the intersection between the coax and the connector was the problem, that each transition between coax and conn