From your post 33 I take it that you found that the previously made fittings were defective so everything's OK now. Did you happen to notice what the defective part was? By the way how did you fix it? How did you know it was defective?
They were not defective, I just botched the installation, specifically the soldering.
On my first attempt, I was using these connectors.
They are not a crimp style connector. Instead they are a pure solder type connector. According to my understanding, there are holes in the barrel of the connector that are used to melt solder into which then fuses the sheilding to the body of the connector, however no matter how hard I tried, I could not get the solder to flow into the connector. The best I could get was it to sort of pool up around the solder hole. Also, this style connector threads onto the LMR coax cable and I had a real hard time getting them so thread on and seat correctly. In other words, my connections were not very well done.
In the hands of someone who is capable of installing them correctly, my understanding is that they are superior to the crimp style connectors. Maybe for land based HAM operators this is true, but for the difficulty of doing this on a sailboat, I would only ever use crimp connectors going forward. They are SO much easier to install.
I did learn a lesson though when soldering the copper core wires. Initially I was going by Mainesails technique thats on his website. He lets the copper core wires protrude from the end of the center pin on the barrel. He cuts it down to length after he is done soldering. I had a real hard time getting the core wires hot enough to get the solder to flow correctly doing it this way and botched a couple of them. When I trimmed the core wires so that they were about a millimeter shorter than the center pin on the connector, I had a much easier time soldering the core wire. To add, on my final connection I didnt even bother to solder the core wires and it had zero effect on the SWR reading so i'm not sure its even 100% necessary to do if its too difficult, for example on the top of the mast where soldering might be too hard to do.
In all fairness though, I suck at soldering and have very little idea of the best way to solder correctly. I sort of bumble through it with just enough competence to get decent end results. If I knew better, or if someone is good at soldering, its probably a much easier thing to accomplish.
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