If you've been around computers and networking for very long, you've probably heard of Power Over Ethernet. It lets you provide device power to a remote peripheral by utilizing copper wires that are already in place. But what if you have a spare piece of Coax and need to pass power across it?

During Field Day, I decided to review my own home shack for operations on emergency power. I had many of the pieces on hand for use in the POTA field, but none of that was readily available downstairs in the ham shack.

I decided to leverage solar for much of the Saturday daytime operations so as not to annoy the neighbors with a generator. Unfortunately the distance from the basement to the sunny part of the yard is non-trivial, and I was struggling to waste my brand new roll of wire for one afternoon's activities.

That's when I remembered that I used to have a dipole mounted on that side of the house. I could have simply cut the end off of the coax and crimped a Power Pole onto the coaxial wire, but I decided to take a more-flexible approach.

This is ultimately what I came up with. It's just a PL-259 solder-type connector, and I soldered a short length of 12ga wire onto the center conductor, and onto the shell. The other end had a traditional Power Pole connector crimped on.

I used a female-to-female barrel connector to attach to the existing male end that was already terminating the coax. Of course, you'll need a pair of these - one for each end of the coax.

The result is a pair of quick adapters, that let me re-use a piece of otherwise abandoned coax that happened to already be routed out of the basement to feed solar-harvested energy back into the shack to charge the battery.

I operated continuously off of my 200 watt panel into an old car battery from about 2pm until dinner time. The solutions isn't the cheapest, or even the most efficient. But isn't Field Day about making it work?

• PL-259 Plug

• Anderson Power Pole

• 16-12ga Power Cord