Cable management and protection
Hi guys,
I was wondering what's your cable management strategy and if you have any tips or use any small gear to protect your cables from torsions.
A colleague of mine destroyed two Trimble radio cables (see picture) most probably by poor storing conditions. As I can't really teach carefullness to him, I'm looking to find an idiotproof system to prevent these kind of problems.
I was thinking of some cable protector used for phones and so on but I'm wondering if something more sturdy exists.
We had two over the years do the same thing. The way we fixed it was we bought the piece that has the antenna screw into it as well as the coaxial cable. This stopped the pinch points and had years of success. AllTerra sells them and they appear to be universal. Hope this helps.
What Kris said. Unless Trimble does something nonstandard, you probably want an NMO (“New Motorola”) antenna mount with a TNC connector for the RF cable and a 5/8x11 female thread to mount to a pole.
Your whip antenna probably unscrews from your antenna mount (the part your cable comes out of) and will screw onto a new mount. Most of these whip antennas attach to NMO mounts.
Many survey vendors carry new mounts. You’ll need to buy a new cable too.
https://allterracentral.com/antenna-mount.html
https://www.baselineequipment.com/antenna-mount-adaptor
In the photo below, your whip antenna screws onto the top threaded (NMO) part. The RF cable attaches to the TNC connector on the side. The whole mount threads onto a pole or tripod.
Waw this is great guys!
So this means i would need one of those adapters + a TNC to TNC cable right?
Thanks a lot!
Nevermind I think I found what I need here :
https://www.wscable.com/22720-5m-trimble-antenna-mount-coax-cable-15-ft/
Trying to find a place to buy this in europe is gonna be hard...
Have found the other major source of failure is winding the cables too tight to jam in some small space of GNSS box. Find nearly all of our RTK issues boil down to radio cable problems, if you can't test them regularly perhaps consider replacing cable on annual/bi-annual period depending on level of use.
