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

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 10:19:04 -0400

Another point on this is to remember the LENGTH of the cable run.  We were
faced with a hospital that was enthusiastic about helping us out.  Any they
even purchased a 2-M StationMaster antenna for us ($$$).  Unfortunately,
they mounted it on the roof- 9 floors, and on the other side of the
hospital, from where the ham station and Emergency Room were located.  The
cable run would have been so long and created so much loss, it would have
been unusable with typical amateur equipment.

A better solution was to put a dual-band antenna on the "canopy" just
outside of the ER entrance into the hospital- total cable run was less than
40-feet.  Granted, we weren't on the top of the hospital, but we could hit
all of the local repeaters and work simplex to all of the places we needed
to.

Also- we didn't need any special cable, the budget was kept to a minimum,
and when the hospital heard that the job just became very simple, they
jumped all over it.  It's also something that, if we had to maintain and
troubleshoot, we probably could.

Just some food for thought...

73 and good luck on your project,
Marlo
KA2IRQ

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of JOE
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 5:03 AM
To: Doug Younker
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Ares-races] Looking for tips on how to best approach those
building a new hospital

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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