Water and Electronics, a match made in hell …

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Water and Electronics, a match made in hell …

It’s been raining around here for a while now. Not in the order of 40 days and 40 nights, but significant. Mind you, I have lived in a place where it rained every day for 57 days, but I digress.

Water, plenty of it and often in all the wrong places.

Being a radio amateur you come across water in many aspects of the hobby, sometimes it comes in handy, like lubricating your throat while you’re calling CQ, or as a ground plane for an antenna, other times, not so much, like when it enters the shack and causes the black smoke to escape from your pride and joy.

As I said, I’m no stranger to rain and in my travels I’ve encountered plenty of it. I managed to travel around Australia for a couple of years and I took with me a two-way satellite dish with sensitive electronics attached. Living in Australia I planned for dry. This place is dry. Often very much so, but as it turns out, dry doesn’t mean without humidity, storms, rain or in one case hail.

These experiences told me a little about protecting electronics from the weather.

I should add a disclaimer here, I’m not a certified weatherman, nor am I certified in waterproofing, water ingress, or any other guarantee. So, if you do as I say and it breaks, you get to keep both halves. That said, I have some thoughts on the matter and I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t share them.

Water is generally everywhere. It gets into everything and it’s one of those silent killers. Electronics and water rarely mix, unless you submerge the electronics in mineral spirits, or if you seal your electronics in circuit board lacquer. Even then, there are few guarantees.

The best you can hope for, in my experience, is to plan for failure, hope for success.

Finding where water gets in is often the hardest part of keeping it out. Sealing off your electronics from the world in a waterproof anything will trap heat, which in turn will cause condensation, which will ultimately cause rust and destruction of your priceless electronics.

Giving your stuff time to acclimatise is a very good idea. For example, if you have a radio stored in your garage and you bring it indoors, leave it there for several hours, if not overnight. Unless you live in Alaska with an in-floor heater to prevent your engine block from freezing, your garage is cold, your home is warm, the combination causes condensation. Alternatively, if your garage is hot, and your home air-conditioned, the reverse is true and condensation will still happen.

Water has a habit of finding its way into anything, encouraged by gravity. That means that a length of coax, run into your wall will attract a stream of water along the coax, straight into the connector and into your wall, or between the core and the braid, or into your radio, or some other undesirable place. If you create a low point before the connector, like a drip-loop, a place where water would have to go up before it can do damage, you’ll likely solve the issue, but don’t discard the effects of wind which can cause water to go uphill.

Connectors are magnets for water. Most connections in use in amateur radio have little or no waterproof rating. There are special waterproof connectors about and you may consider using those, but alternatives like self-amalgamating or rubber tape, which you wind tightly around a connection and in doing so,

Read the full article at https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/water-and-electronics-a-match-made-in-hell.622945/. STRAY SIGNALS does not claim ownership of the article.

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