Where to find shielded hookup cable?

I suggest Belden 9264. Foil shield with a ground wire makes it easy to terminate on a PCB.

Perhaps you should describe what you need? Is it carying RF, power, audio, data, etc? Environmental limitations? Leakage issues? Impedance? Hand or machine solderable? Etc?

It usually takes only a few minutes to find nothing conclusive.

Yeah lots of belden cable with all sorts of sheilds.

I was going to say it sounds a piece of thin coax would work. (RG174) or some 75 ohm stuff.

George H.

Thanks, but 50 ohm coax is too big, too stiff, and too "spec" for my simpler needs (see below).

Carrying a low (ie line) voltage audio signal. Used inside of indoor electronic equipment. Leakage and impedance not all that critical. The main thing is to connect an audio signal and its ground to a jack on a front panel. Hand solderable using Weller soldering station.

Unfortunately, my sample cable, shown at the top in the photo, contains no markings on the outer jacket.

-- Don Kuenz

Mouser

$65 for 100 feet, 26AWG stranded inner conductor (copper covered steel), 0.11 inch outer diameter.

Buy some ordinary phono RCA jack patch cord and cut off what you need. If you are near Vancouver, BC I'd give you a foot or two for a couple of bucks...

John :-#)#

RG/174 is .1" outer diameter. I used a lot of it in guitar amps in the '70s to get rid of RF problems. It's smaller than phono or single conductor shielded mic cable.

I only paid $20 for a 1000 foot roll, surplus, a few years ago. ;-)

I'll stand on my recommendation. I'm assuming that you have a genuine product to design, not building a home project.

Since the coax is internal to your device, it's not going to require much flexing. That means you can use foil instead of braid. I would think that a somewhat stiff cable would be an advantage as it tends to stay in place, rather then requiring ty-wraps and hot melt glue to keep the cable in place. If this is appealing (and you don't care about price) look into semi-rigid coax cables, which come mostly in

The inclusion of a simple drain wire in Belden 9264 makes termination to the PCB and 3.5mm jack quite simple, which should be your primary concern in building a product. Since it's apparently not carrying any RF, a single wire ground is sufficient. Note that there is no bare copper, which mostly eliminates the need for local conformal coating at the end points.

Incidentally, the equivalent 75 ohm cable is a larger diameter. If

From the photo, it appears that the outer jacket is rather thick. Do you really want/need that? Such a thick jacket makes sense when the cable might stepped on or mis-handled by the user. However, if it's protected inside an enclosure, it's totally wasted.

Probably for good reasons. The manufacture doesn't want to spend the money to mark their cable or they don't want to be identified if it fails. I have a roll of Alpha(?) cable that looks much like that in the office. However, I'm playing hard to find for a few days. As I recall, the shield was not braided, but rather a spiral wrap of unplated copper. That makes it easy to spin into a solderable lead, but is rather marginal for shielding. I can't tell from your photo if it's braided or spiral shield.

And the trouble with plain old twisted pair is...?

works for cat6.

This should do the trick. The price can't be beat either.

-- Don Kuenz

It will be interesting to see how well this works. I'll give it a try while waiting for the RG-174 to arrive. Thanks for the idea.

-- Don Kuenz

I like to strip the jacket off the end, then push the braid towards the cut. Take a tiny screwdriver, or a sharp pick and pull the wire through the braid, then pull the empty braid flat. I would use the piece of jacket I removed to cover the braid, if I needed to insulate the shield in a tight place.

And it's sturdier than a lot of "audio cable" I've seen.

Michael

I've never had a problem with it, unlike some brands of mic or audio cable that only had six strands of wire in the braided shield. Almost as bad was the Japanese audio cable with a carbon impregnated layer of plastic, with a drain wire for the 'shield'.