Where can someone buy Outdoor phone wire Featured

The home I lived in as a child until I was 20 had all above ground phone lines and the line to our house had close to 50 feet to the pole behind the neighbors house. It lasted all those years and was self supporting.

Yes, I intend to do that.

It's my own personal pole, not the electric company's pole. It only runs one outlet for livestock tank heater. I put the insulator for the phone wire 4 or 5 feet below the power line.

Tried that. They dont work well in metal sided buildings.

I was looking around for alternate (cheap) wire. You can buy 100 foot 18 or

Greg

I think with OP being on a farm, he'll need something a little deeper. My suggestion is to rent a trencher and lay down some PVC pipe down a foot or two under the surface. This will have the additional bonus of having the pipe down there if he wants to run some ethernet or other type of cabling in the future.

Jon

Unless it needs to be a wire for for some particular reason that distance would be no problem for a good wireless handset/base station combo.

In the case of a cellphone there are various solutions. I just set one up for a friend. They had -98dBm in one select spot outside. They now have -70 dBm in 2/3s of the house.

-snip-

you're a lucky dog. I've had 3 different systems over the last 10 years or so. The latest, and best, make it to my driveway- with static- The driveway is

phone line MUST BE TWISTED PAIR or all you will get is hum:(

He said the metal shed is the problem with that. Lots of complaints with cordless and metal sheds. Might or might not be overcome, depending on the phone. Never dealt with it myself. I kinda like the idea of stringing the phone line through eyebolts screwed to the power pole, pulling it tight, tying it off, weatherproofing it where it enters a building, thinking about lightning protection, etc. But I don't have to make the idea work.

you'd have to calculate whether it will actually hold it, especially if there's any ice and wind load.

Baloney.

I've watched installers at work and they just hammer a hook into the nearest wood structure they can find. There's no calculating involved.

The old drop lines were not twisted pair but with the advent of data circuits going into homes, twisted pair drop lines were developed. I installed a T1 demarc extension in a retail store Monday and the two cables we pulled in had two shielded twisted pair and a drain wire that I had to connect to the jacks on either end. ^_^

TDD

Underground doesn't make a difference if there is the typical significant difference in potential you describe because it typically toasts whatever is connected to each side even with protectors.

If you want immunity from replacing stuff in July during peak thunderstorms fiber or wireless is the way to go.

"George" wrote

Stick the line in metal conduit. End of problem.

and for a buried one it's plausible that you won't need it (depends on how the garage and the workshop are positioned and the height of the roof of each structure)

You should still install them for underground. For instance if there is a lightning strike to a tree near the workshop, the earth (and earthing systems) at the workshop and house may be many thousands of volts different.

Not true, well, not running on poles with ac. I got lots of phone wire that's not twisted. As long as you got closely spaced pairs, that's good enough in house. Sure, twisted is ideal. Extension wire is FLAT. Earpiece is FLAT. Tv twin lead is just parallel wires, and that rejects noise.

Greg

Twisted pairs are required with multiple differential signals in the same cable group. The wires are right next to each other.

Greg

Nonsense. Unless your telephone wire is on the order of 100miles, twisting it does nothing for "hum". It will help high speed communications, though.

That doesn't help much in practice because the high difference in potential between the two buildings is what toasts the devices on either or both ends of the copper.

It is next to impossible to totally protect against surges with the exception of simply not allowing for a very large difference in potential to matter such as by using fiber.

Wireless and fiber certainly eliminate many problems but surge protection is not that difficult. You treat the underground wire at both ends like you would tread an overhead service from the phone company.

I don't think it is particularly difficult, and lots of people protect against surges. For instance large parts of Florida.