Does having multiple RJ45 jacks degrade the Internet signal a lot?

[Chuck Banshee]

The Ubiquiti 15volt POE adapter integral power supply is 0.8 amps.

[Chuck Banshee]

I only belatedly realized the Home Depot cat5e outdoor cable has the length printed every two feet.

It turns out that the 'estimated' outdoor 100 feet turned into 224 actual feet of cable! (The printed numbers start at the antenna at 017350 feet and end at the office wall plate at 017526.)

Personally, I'm amazed I put that much wire in the house! I made a lot of mistakes!

For one thing, I put a LOT of wire in loops in the floor rafters (for future use) but I must have put way too much there. Also I left quite a lot outside so that when I bury it, I can route around obstacles - but - again, I left quite a lot.

The main mistake I made was buying 500 feet of the expensive outdoor wire. In hindsight, I 'should' have bought 150 feet of the tan outdoor stuff, and the rest indoor blue plenum stuff because half the wire I bought will be inside the house.

But I made a LOT of other mistakes!

For example, look how CLOSE I came to cutting the electrical wire in half!

[Chuck Banshee]

I wonder what would explain how I can connect to the broadband router's web page (eg 192.168.1.1) and to the radio on top of the antenna (eg

10.100.0.1) from the same wireless laptop inside the house.

I can connect to both - but since the laptop is 192.168.1.(something), by all rights, it should only connect to the broadband router (which is on the same subnet).

How it still can connect to the antenna radio (which is on a wholly different subnet) is beyond my understanding.

BTW, here's a daylight picture of the antenna wiring.

What do you guys do to secure wires when you go down an antenna?

[Chuck Banshee]

Yikes.

I paid $75 for 500 feet of this (CMR CMX Outdoor RoHS) cable!

I see your $44 cable is for twice that, at 1000 feet!

The only problem, I guess, is it's not outdoor (from what I can tell): CAT5E 1000FT BULK UTP CABLE ETHERNET LAN NETWORK CAT5 1000 PULL BOX WHITE

However, only the first 100 feet of my installation actually 'needed' to be outdoor cable. The rest is indoor.

[Chuck Banshee]

Hi Jeff,

It's Hilltop. And it's 802.11, not NV2.

They're an easy line-of-sight connection at -65 dBm yet the AP is about a mile or two away (hard to tell just by looking). (I always wondered if the ACK information in the radio is accurate for telling me how far the AP is actually away from me?)

Hilltop told me to put the radio in bridge mode but they said they preferred the extra protection of router mode - but they didn't want to get fancy on the initial setup.

Here's my water-pipe antenna, simply stuck into an existing hole in the ground!

I was originally in router mode, with NAT on the radio ... so I 'think' I was originally double nat'd. But, now I'm in bridge mode (because the WISP provider had me change access points to one that didn't do DHCP).

My setup now is bridge mode with the WISP-supplied IP address and the WISP supplied gateway. Then I have my broadband router.

So the only firewall is the broadband router.

Here's a picture of the antenna and radio (set up as a bridge) on the ground:

[Chuck Banshee]

Hi Jeff,

You were totally right!

I 'thought' it was a hundred-foot run of the outdoor cable from the antenna to the house (even allowing for the ten feet of antenna).

First off, I extended the water-pipe antenna to about 16 feet; then I wrapped the cat5e outdoor cable around the water pipe like a barber shop pole! (See pic)

Then, I added about 20 or 30 extra feet for zig zagging in the yard when I finally bury it in the ground (I'm told we're not allowed to have wires going to our houses in the air out here).

Then, once inside the house at a convenient spot (see picture below) I looped an extra few feet of wire.

The total was 224 feet for that one hundred-foot run to the house! (Luckily the cable is marked every two feet so the antenna end reads

017350 feet while the end in the office reads 017526 feet.)

Here is the sequence showing my 'bright idea' trying to avoid the garage by sneaking in on an air conditioning pipe!

Likewise, that short run to the game room with tons of extra wire looped in the crawl space took another 62 feet! (from the 017528 mark to the

017590 mark).

So, you're totally right that it takes way more cable than I thought!

One mistake I made was to buy all outdoor cable. In hind sight, only half of the cable needed to be the tan outdoor quality. The rest could have been cheaper indoor plenum (blue) stuff.

[Chuck Banshee]

Now I see this!

I havn't had Internet for a day as I had to disassemble everything (to follow up on everyone's advice here) and re-assemble.

Here is how I labeled the wires:

But, I like your idea of labeling the woodwork better!

[Chuck Banshee]

Yes. There are many feet of cable stored inside the crawl space, looped around and around and around and hanging on a nail in case it's ever needed.

The bad news is that I've more than doubled my 100 feet (it's now 224 feet from the top of the antenna to the wall plate in the office!).

Here is a picture of what's inside the wall! (I hadn't expected electricity so close!)

And, here's the (almost) finished product: PS: Nobody mentioned that the wall plates come in three colors of white! :)

[Chuck Banshee]

And, I made a LOT of mistakes!

Here, for example, is a sequence showing my noob mistake in wiring for the radio male RJ45!

a. This shows me blissfully unaware of the mistake I'm about to make:

b. This shows me choosing the type of connection (A or B): c. This shows the problem (you can't fit the connector onto the radio!): d. And, this shows my solution (I had to cut the end off & do it again):

[Jeff Liebermann]

The stuff I excavated on eBay is not outdoor cable. There are various flavors of outdoor cable. What I think you have is UV proof but not not waterproof (gel filled). I can't tell from here and the Comtran web pile is useless:

However the problem is not UV protection. Since you're just dumping the cable on the ground, you're going to punch holes in it every time someone walks on it. Same with critters chewing on the cable. What you'll need is UV proof, water proof (gel filled), and armoured. Or, you can use some form of conduit.

Don't spiral the coax down the mast. When you drop the mast for maintenance, you leave far too many opportunities to punch holes in the coax when it hits the ground. Same with leaning a ladder against the mast for inspection. Also visualize what multiple cables going down the mast will look like. Run the cables down the BACK side of the mast and secure with black, UV proof, ty-wraps.

Also, in a previous post, you mentioned other electronics stores in the SF Bay area. Here's a map,

created by Glenn Geller, as posted in ba.internet.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Well, blue ink on paper, inside a vinyl sleeve will work. The only problem is that after about 2 years, the blue ink will fade to invisible ink. I use a proper label maker, vinyl labels, and use scotch tape to attach to wire. I also don't use such long labels as bending the wire puts the label under tension, which eventually breaks. I once labeled a phone closet full for station wire, only to find a year later that all 25 labels had fallen off.

Nope. Labeling the 2x4 is for mid span identification. You still have to label the end points. Labeling the hole is also problematic if you have more than one cable through it. It's mostly a convenience when dealing with later rework.

Incidentally, when going between floors, I try to use conduit instead of just running the wires. Many reasons, but the big one is that going between floors is more difficult than horizontal runs. Where there's one cable, there's always a need for more. My own derangement has about 10 cables crammed into 1" conduit between upstairs and downstairs.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Good.

No, it's not even close. Flight time (speed of light) is about 1ft per nanosecond. A mile would be about 6 microseconds. The best resolution you could get with ping is perhaps 0.1 millisecond. Most of the ping delay is in the CPU and attendent IP stack in the router.

Here's a spare time math problem. Calculate the area of the antenna. Estimate your maximum local wind speed. Calculate the wind load on the antenna and the mast. Tie a rope to the antenna and pull with the calculated wind load. If the mast falls over, find some guy wires or ropes.

I can't tell from here how deep the mast extends into the ground, how much concrete is in the hole, or soil conditions.

Good. That should work better than double NAT.

See the 4 screws securing the bracket to the antenna? If the pipe hits the coax connector and radio, then simply unscrew the bracket, rotate 180 degrees, re-attach, and you have an offset mount. Having the antenna mounted unsymmetrically may seem a bit odd, but it should work.

Also, verify whether you're vertically or horizontally polarized. No clue what Hilltop is using, but it should be the same. Mounting it at a 45 degree angle, as in a previous photo, will work, but not very well.

[Jeff Liebermann]

I'm always right (except when I'm wrong). I have a roll of nylon twine, that I've marked every 10ft, that I use for estimating cable runs (and also as a pull line). The numbers on the cable jacket are handy for calculating if there's enough cable left in the box to do the job.

Neither is suitable if you're just dumping it on the ground. What you want is direct burial cable, preferably gel filled, and possibly armored. That's not cheap, but you only will need about 175 ft of it. You won't find that at Home Despot, but might find it at an electrical supply house. However, eBay is cheaper:

About $150/1000ft. Watch out for shipping charges. The stuff is heavy. Notice the flakey white stuff on the wires. That's the gel. I hate the stuff.

[Char Jackson]

I wonder what the pros will say about all that extra cable. I normally leave a single loop, maybe 12-18 inches, so that I can reterminate the end if a connection fails. I don't know what the 'best practices' are.

[Char Jackson]

I assume you're able to connect to the WISP radio via your broadband router. That's what routers do, they act as an interface between two or more networks.

That doesn't look quite as good as I'd hoped. Just thinking out loud, I wonder if you'd get more stability, more protection from the elements, and more protection from general damage by putting the vertical run inside a small conduit, and solidly attaching the conduit to the pole.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Duh... or, you could just add a right angle Type-N connector and just move the radio out of the way.

I have a few if you're in a hurry (i.e. before it rains).

Also:

That doesn't look like it has much concrete in the ground. It's probably just fine when the ground is dry, but I hate to see what will happen when the ground gets wet, and the nearby tree branches start wacking the pole around. It's not going to fall over, but it might move around enough to loose the path:

Hmmm... are you sure the pipe is 16ft long? Judging by the height of the nearby picnic table (about 30" high), the mast looks like it's about 25ft high.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Ummm... make that about 31ft:

Perhaps that might explain why you consumed so much CAT5?

[Chuck Banshee]

When I look back at it, it 'does' look a little shoddy just wrapped around the pole like a barber-shop twist.

That's a GREAT IDEA!

I could also, I guess, put the wire INSIDE the water pipe mast but I like the idea of strapping PVC conduit to the pole, alongside the pole, with the wire running down.

PS: I wish I thought of that 'before' I did it - but this suggestion will help others and I can do it in my retrofit when I add the TV antenna!

[Chuck Banshee]

Hi Jeff,

I appreciate the calculations.

You even made ME wonder if I had bought a 20 foot pipe instead of 10 feet!

It turns out that the table, because it's far away from the mast, looks deceptively small.

Here is a shot with a 3-foot yardstick and a 2-foot square next to the mast:

Here is that same shot but I moved back to where the original picture was taken:

The picnic table looks deceptively small. I'm not sure why but it must have something to do with the angles or distance.

The antenna looks to be about 15.5 feet above ground (give or take a half foot for couplings and mounts). And it's about 3 feet into the ground.

I 'could' dig it deeper if I need to as I have plenty of height.

I do agree with you - that it's still too tall (I guess I should take off the two-foot section on top). I only put it there because I bought it for the TV antenna but I'm not sure if I can get 'any' signal pointing southwest in the Santa Cruz mountains.

[Chuck Banshee]

I agree.

Conduit is what I'll use then.

OK. The logic (once I know it) is impeccable. Will do.

Wow. Very nice. I didn't know about lots of them, for example, HomeTech Solutions off of DeAnza. Wow. More than I ever knew. Lots better than Home Depot! :)