[Ares-races] Looking for tips on how to best approach those building a new hospital

[JOE]

One of the major problems in equipping a hospital with radio equipment is 
the routing of antenna cables from the rooftop to the operating room that 
might be several floors below.  Try to see if a metal conduit can be 
installed from the roof area (or upper floor) to the room that you will be 
locating the ham equipment in.   Then, you can easily pull coax through 
this conduit as you need in the future (a pull string left in the conduit 
is really handy).

I work for a cellular company and we periodically have to do similar 
antenna installations on buildings.  The running of antenna feedline 
becomes a major problem at times, sometimes even having to Xray floors to 
be certain that we do not damage existing services.  Core boring concrete 
floors is very expensive, as is plenum-rated coax that is fire resistant 
for open runs in hospitals.  There are local safety codes that have to be 
met when running coax through the ceiling of some hospitals.

I would approach the hospital with the thought that they probably need to 
run some kind of conduit for emergency services radios anyway, so the hams 
could share the conduit, or better yet, have their own parallel run of 
conduit.  Don't wait too long to fill the conduit with coax, as the IT 
department or someone else might discover it and grab it for their own use!

73, Joe, K1ike

At 08:24 PM 7/26/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Greetings;
>
>     In the small rural community in which I live plans are starting to build
>a new small hospital.

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