or Buy Cheap, Buy Thrice
In the summer of 2007 I ran my first coaxial cable run that was actually successful, and since I had no immediate plans for putting a television in that room, and was blowing lots of money on Cat5e, connectors and drywall repair I tried doing it without spending all that much money. That was a big mistake. This blog entry tells you about the tools that I've decided to use and why.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Home Depot is pretty much my exclusive supplier for cabling and related accessories. The prices seem reasonable compared to online, and I can go get the stuff the same day. I started out with the crimper from GE that was about $5, and the corresponding crimp-on connectors. I flat out couldn’t make those work, they could just not be properly jammed onto the cable that I was trying to jam them onto. I also couldn’t manage to properly adjust the cheap coaxial stripper, so I ended up turning to my commercial electric wire stripper; which is a little tool with big bang for the buck. I would include a picture, but these were useless enough that they went into the garbage can.
I had some success with the Ideal screw-on connectors, certainly more than with the GE crimp on connectors, but still wasn’t really happy and given even a little tug they would come off too easily. I then upgraded to the Ideal crimp on connectors, with this
Ideal ratcheting crimp tool.
This tool is a quality tool, and combined with the ideal connectors I was able to get reasonable results, but still managed to mess up a few of the connectors. I’ve recently started replacing the 20 year old RG59 coaxial cable in my house with newer RG-6Q, and have settled on what for now is my final answer for terminating coaxial cable. The
Ideal Omniseal compression tool and connectors:
The concept of this tool is a bit different than the crimp on connectors, in which the tool basically crushes the outside of the connector onto the cable. The compression connectors, are slipped onto the cable and then inserted into the tool. When you close the handle, a plunger compresses the connector, causing the plastic sleeve and the metal outside to come together.
Before:
After:
The action of the tool is that you have the jaws open like so:
And you squeeze them close, as you squeez, the top of the connector is pushed down onto the bottom, as seen from underneath the tool:
The compression connectors and tool are more expensive ($1.25 each), but I have only messed up one, because I did not push it on far enough. They result has also given me better video quality, so I can’t complain. Unfortunately, none of these tools (cheap or expensive) have really good directions, so I had to guess and practice a little bit to be able to use them effectively.
Finally, the Ideal coaxial cable stripper is worth the $15. I was able to get it cutting my RG-6Q cable with only about 5 minutes worth of fiddling and adjustment. There is a nice convenient selector for different cable sizes, and most importantly I could get the thing properly adjusted pretty easily.
How it works is there are three stepped knives with set screws that let you adjust the depth. One of them cuts the jacket, the next cuts the jacket, shield, and dielectric. Then you push back the shield over the cable like this:
It is important that you have no contact between the sheilding and the center conductor. I've found that after you start off folding back the shielding that by pushing on a compression connector you can get most of the rest down (you can push it on, take it off, double check everything, and then push it back on).
I think the moral of the story here is really that you shouldn’t screw around with cheap coaxial cable termination tools. Just go and buy the best one you can get, it will pay for itself. I’ve managed to spend $10 on a crappy crimp tool and connectors, $5 on screw on connectors, $55 on a good crimp tool and connectors, and now $60 on a good compression tool (and another $5 for an equivalent amount of connectors). Instead of going through a $135 progression, I should have just went for the $65 tool and connectors to begin with even though I didn’t plan on terminating that much coax. The $15 on a crappy tool might not have been a bad decision, but the $50 on a good crimp tool probably was. I should have gone straight for the compression connectors; and hopefully me telling you how I wasted a bunch of time and money will prevent you from doing the same.