[Premium-Rx] Keeping rodents off coax

[Steve Stutman]

Hi,

I have a couple of wooden storage sheds about 10' x 12'. Not quite 
hermetic; popular rodent shelter in winter. I toss in about a pound of 
mothballs every year. Gives snowblower and small outboards scent of eau 
de napthalene, but rodents don't like it. Have never tested the 
gain/loss of isotropic mothball, but I'd bet it's good to repel for at 
least a foot. So maybe one walks the cable with 10-15 lbs of mothballs. 
Suspect that anything effective has vapor pressure higher than a rock, 
but should last awhile.

Otherwise maybe replace with a hardline end from cable TV outfit, 
elevate, insulate, and put 24 VAC on it.

73,
Steve


Terry O'Laughlin wrote:

> OK, so you all think I'm nuts because I received 14,508 e-mails from 
> John Reed today.  I'm encountering vermin problems in another area of 
> my life as well.
>
> Last summer I helped a retired fellow radio enthusiast in a rural area 
> about 20 miles out of town by installing a log periodic on a short 
> tower atop a ridge 400 feet from his house.  To keep the cost down we 
> used RG-6 as the feedline with a preamp at the antenna.
>
> The system died two weeks ago and I traced it down to rodents chewing 
> on the coax, which lies on the ground going through about 350 feet of 
> woodland.
>
> Does anyone know of anything I can simply wipe on the coax to keep the 
> mischievous little jaws off the outer jacket?  I don't need to kill 
> them, just make the coax as unpalatable as possible.
>
> Terry O'
>
> P.S.  My computer came up clean with AVG Antivirus, Spyware Blaster, 
> Spybot and Ad-Aware, all with the latest definitions.  I don't know 
> what happened to generate all the e-mails, but I know the statistics 
> on the RA-6790 oscillator quite well.
>
>