Armoured Cat5 - where to get?

[Grunff]

Subject says it all - wehere can I get some armoured Cat5?

TIA

[Christian McArdle]

Steel conduit and normal Cat5?

Christian.

[Grunff]

Well, that's the fallback, but given the shape of the trench armoured would be much nicer + easier.

I know it exists, I just can't find a supplier.

[Christian McArdle]

Point to point wireless might be cheaper than laying a trench. However, if you already have the trench for other services, then this is less attractive. I've still never come across armoured Cat5. Armoured telephone cable is easy enough to find. If you do find armoured Cat5, let everyone know, it could be very useful.

What sort of run is this? Have you considered using optical fibre? This might be good for long runs, especially when you start getting serious mismatches in earth potential. You can get media converters for around 90 quid nowadays. It is excellent for long runs in noisy environments, but serious overkill to run it 10m to your shed.

Christian.

[Grunff]

Trench is already dug for other services, wireless ruled out for several reasons.

I'm sure I've seen the stuff, but I can't think where.

It's about 50m between house + office. I did think about fibre, but can't really think of enough advantages to justify it.

[Peter Parry]

Nowhere at sensible prices - but a coil of 10mm copper microbore heating tube, some thin nylon line and normal Cat 5 makes a good substitute.

[Phil]

Armoured off-the shelf is hard to come by but companies can armour it for you, however for 50m the cost would most likely be too much to justify.

Electrical isolation - any problems in one building won't take out the system in the other. Noise immunity. Avoids problems caused by differing earth potentials in different buildings. It's probably cheaper than getting some twisted pair armoured. Fast Ethernet today, gigabit tomorrow - fibre will take it all whereas Cat

5e just might.

Phil

[Grunff]

Yes, but I'd still want the fibre to be armoured! So even if I decide to use fibre, it's back to square one.

[Christian McArdle]

Don't discount the electrical benefits of using fibre, though. You could have real problems on Cat5 over 50m with incompatible voltage levels that might interact with the building earthing arrangements, especially with TT earthing, which would be recommended for such building separation. Fibre would overcome this as it doesn't use voltage.

Christian.

[ChrisJ]

You have to be careful with the differing earths, this can cause probelsm in teh hubs/switches at either end.

If you really must use cat 5 how about some water /hose pipe and just push the standard cat5 through that?

ChrisJ

[Grunff]

Yes, using conduit of some sort is certainly an option, but steel wire armoured cable, like my mains and phone cables, would be preferable.

It's a shame that there don't appear to be any suppliers for the stuff. Armoured mains and phone are easy and cheap to obtain, cat5 is non-existent.

[Grunff]

Point taken - but do you know any suppliers or armoured fibre?

;-)

[Lawrence]

Or even flexible plastic conduit.

Depends how far the run is. My duct is 100mm plastic sewer pipe. But if I was running one or two cat 5 cables over 10 yards I would probably use flexible plastic conduit.

What about this stuff.

Christian McArdle wrote:

Lawrence

usenet at lklyne dt co dt uk

[Andrew Gabriel]

If it's for Cat 5 ethernet, I'm pretty sure the cable is isolated at both ends, i.e. both the NIC and hub use isolating transformers on the cable pairs. Other applications don't necessarily (like ISDN).

[fred]

In article , ChrisJ writes

No help to Grunff, but the pairs are transformer isolated to 1500Vac, so I don't see a problem with differing earths.

[fred]

In article , Grunff writes

Searching for 'outdoor' and 'CAT5' gets a few hits:

doesn't look that meaty, but the 'specifications' link doc says it's suitable for direct burial. The main site is in the states, but he'll sell by the foot :-), might help.

[Christian McArdle]

That's a lot of isolation! So it's OK, provided you use it for Ethernet. Other services may vary, presumably.

Christian.

[Grunff]

Thanks fred - I'd already found that one and a similar product from RS. But I wouldn't personally like to bury that without further protection, so I ruled it out.

It's looking increasingly likely that I'll have to use some conduit (I've got plenty of spare 25mm MDPE, so that's probably going to be it).

[John]

Agreed. Also avoids the risk of lightning strikes inducing pd in the ground and destroying the NICs. Surely 802.11x is the way to go for this application, but OP doesn't want this, so I agree - fibre is the best bet. A good place to check out products is

[Chris Hodges]

Getting the nylon through the microbore could be interesting - try magnets - an old disk drive one on the inside perhaps.