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25ft 10ga power drops:




I should have realized this earlier, but I need to be able to run power drops over to the other stations at
Field Day. All I have had available are long, thick distribution jumpers (50 and 100 ft of #6 and #8) which
was getting kind of silly to run to 3 stations that are 10-20 feet away. It was either that, or use the #10
CCA jumpers, which were pretty lossy when trying to charge up batteries. (or just flat out run a station that
didn't have a battery)

So I picked up 100 feet of "the good stuff" #10 copper from Sky High. This twin-lead is a high-strand-count
super-flexible wire, with a silicon jacket. Pretty floppy, feels like a (really heavy) wet noodle. I cut it up
into four 25ft segments, and added my usual powerpole connectors and heat shrink. This wire required a little
bit of consideration though on how best to solder it. At first I was going to put SB50's on it, but nobody at
the stations is using that, so that just meant making more SB50/PP45 adapters, so I may as well just put PP45's
on it. With all the copper in them, these little coils weigh over 2 pounds each.

I'm pleased with how the jumpers came out. I suppose they're not a very impressive project compared to some
of the other things I've made, but even the boring things can be satisfying when they do their job well.

Later I decided to split one of the 25 foot lines into two 12.5 foot runs, for improved performance at high
current. (at 30 amps, charge power drops 47% over 25 feet, but only drops 30% over 12.5 feet)


1. materials

2. prep

3. soldering

4. if the contact won't go in all the way

5. exact steps

6. more jumpers



last updated 01/05/2025 at 21:42:02 by make_www_index.command version 2024.07.09.A