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What is the difference between 75 Ohm and 50 Ohm coaxial cable?
For those who understand dB gain, 75 Ohm can lose as much as -1.1 dB compared to 50 Ohm per 100 feet of cable. In essence at 100 ft of cable, 50 Ohm is roughly 1.3x more powerful than the 75 Ohm in terms of maintaining signal coming from the same source.
Can I use 75 Ohm coax for CB?
Sure, you can use 75 ohm coax instead of 50 ohm. In some cases (such as feeding a dipole), 75 ohm coax may be a better match to the load than 50 ohm. In other cases (such as feeding a vertical), it may be a worse match. You may not even need to do additional matching.
Which is better 50 Ω or 75 Ω coax?
Jerry Sevick, W2FMI, described the use of multifilar-wound toroid cores to perform 1.56:1 transformations over wide HF frequency ranges. Given the vagaries of antennas as loads, this should provide a very close match between 50 Ω and 75 Ω coax – as long as the impedance at the input to the 75 Ω coax is reasonably close to 75 Ω.
Can you feed RG-6 with 50Ω coax?
Feed a resonant dipole with 50Ω coax, and you actually have a small mismatch! The power handing capability of RG-6 is almost identical to RG-213. And even at the legal limit, the voltage is still low enough that flashover will not occur between the center conductor and the shield even with a mismatch.
When to use 75 Ω instead of 50 Ω?
The larger 1:1 Guanella balun in the upper portion of the photograph is not needed in unun applications, such as when matching a 50 Ω system to 75 Ω feedlines. Sevick measured this transformer to be essentially flat from 1.5MHz to 40MHz. Thanks for contributing an answer to Amateur Radio Stack Exchange!
Why does CATV use 75 ohm coax cable?
The common application of CATV means big-box stores are quick to carry cheap 75 ohm coax because their customers care primarily about cost, and for a short CATV run, the high loss and poor isolation of a cheap cable may not be especially critical or noticed by a typical consumer.