[MLB-WIRELESS] Waterproof casing advice...

[Nick Grundy]

Down round these parts in tassie we generally wander into jaycar or the local electrical
wholesaler and get a IP55 rated plastic box. Typically grey or beige in colour they are
designed to seal up and work for years in direct sunlight and suffer through winter and
all it's fun rain things.

Almost 60-70% of our network gear (minitar, svec, dlink's) are mounted in these boxes
either directly onto the base of the waveguide or on the back of the old austar dish
backscreen.

(Short coax runs)++;

the boxes we use typically retail for about 20 bucks.  Infact i've gone and used one
for my APRS module in my car.


> G'day,
> 
> In the process of getting together all the gear to connect to another
> site about 50~100m away. I have minitar AP's, cable glands, POE stuff
> etc. The only things I'm missing is a waterproof box to put the minitars
> in, and a pole and mounting bits and pieces.
> 
> As the distance is so small, I wanted to try using the standard little
> minitar omnis instead of some sort of additional aerial. This way I can
> put the minitar+aerial in a sealed plastic box, with only the cat5 with
> POE going into it via a single gland.
> 
> I had a look at the Jay-car boxes. There are two boxes that could fit
> the minitar+aerial (on an awkward angle, but the larger sizes were too
> big). They both have nice rubber seals, and the only difference appears
> to be different plastics (one grey, the other white, with different
> plastic TLA's). They are $15+ each, which seems kinda pricey for a
> plastic box.
> 
> I was thinking a $2 tupperware container sealed with silicon and mounted
> on a pole with large cable ties should be good enough for the job.
> However, I have a few concerns;
> 
> 1) will tupperware plastic perish badly under UV exposure. Will a coat
> of white spray paint help? Will some paints interfere with the RF?
> 
> 2) most tupperware seems to use clear thermoplastic. Will the light
> going through the tupperware heat and/or UV degrade the AP itself? Will
> a coat of white spray paint help? Should a choose a non-clear tupperware
> container?
> 
> 3) Are cable-ties a bad idea for pole-mounting? I have a heap of very
> big cable ties (50cm long, 1~2cm wide) that I have used outdoors before,
> and they seemed to degrade a bit, but only broke under repeated flexing.
> I _think_ they would be OK for this application, but welcome feedback.
> 
> 4) I want to mount it on the existing TV aerial pole. Ideally I would
> attach it to the pole just below or above the TV aerial. Would this
> interfere with the TV? I could try attaching an extension pole to the TV
> aerial pole; any hint's on the best way to do this? What about
> lightning?
> 
> The best sized case I've found is a black-plastic VHS video container.
> However, I don't know how the black plastic would handle UV, and it
> would probably be trickier to silicon seal than a tupperware container.
> Anyone tried using one of these?
> 
> Basically, what is a decent budget RF transparent case that would fit a
> minitar+aerial, and what's the best way to mount the sucker up a pole.
> 
> -- 
> Donovan Baarda <abo at minkirri.apana.org.au>
> http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
> 
> 
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> 

~Nick (VK7HAF)
-----
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)

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