LMR400 vs DX Engineering 400Max for 2M and 70cm

[jgalak]

Anyone have thoughts on these two cables?  I need to do a run of, at most, 60'.  Mostly for sattelite and FM work, maybe some weak signal eventually.  LMR600 seems overkill for this.

Outdoors, so needs to stand up to weather and sun.

[Howardlong]

Anyone have thoughts on these two cables?  I need to do a run of, at most, 60'.  Mostly for sattelite and FM work, maybe some weak signal eventually.  LMR600 seems overkill for this.

Outdoors, so needs to stand up to weather and sun.

LMR400 seems perfectly reasonable.

I ran a pair of 180’ of Westflex 103 (roughly equivalent to Belden 9913 in performance terms) for my rooftop satellite setup, this was back in the days of HEOs like AO-10 and AO-40. I did have pretty decent preamps and polarisation switchers at the feedpoints of the antennas, which included 2m, 70cm, 13cm and 23cm, plus a multiband vertical for HF. This was on an Az/El rotator at the top of a seven storey building: I had about 20’ of more flexible RG213 from the preamps/antennas to a weatherproof box holding ~100W HPAs for 70cm and 23cm plus duplexers.

This was very successful, but being in a city location it suffered a lot of local noise particularly closer to the horizon.

For today’s LEOs, you don’t need much power, but you do need a decent receive setup. Having decent feedpoint mounted preamps addresses the receive side.