Extending Cat5 Runs

[Prodeus]

I am looking to open several more tower sites soon and some of these towers will be well over 300 feet tall. It would be greatly beneficial if I was able to put equipment above 300 feet on these towers. I do know that cat5 Ethernet has a 328 foot limit. I have heard of people using line drivers or things such as that to over come this limit. I had considered putting the radios at around the 300 mark and then using LMR400 to continue up the tower to the actual antenna but some of these situations will have me using another 200 to 300 feet of LMR, and this is gunna cause a great deal of cable loss. The idea was thrown around the office of using an amplifier to over come this loss but I think that this is just gunna cause a great deal more problems.

Since these are runns going up the tower, where there is now power but at the bottom of the tower, shotting the signal up the tower is out of the question.

I am wondering if anyone has ever used any kind of line driver to push ethernet beyond the 328 foot limit or if anyone has run into this type of problem before and what solution you found to the problem.

[Alan87i]

I'm no expert But from what I have read the max distance is not set at 328 feet or 100 meters because of power on the line but more because of the time it takes the packet to travel that far and the ack to come back. Something about collision on the line. My guess would be try an amp and a switch half way up on POE. Fiber would work but is Expensive as you know.

Allan
VA2CBE

[M/Q]

Going above 300 ft, I would want to use something that I knew worked and would not give me any problems at a later time. You could locate a PoE switch at the 300ft level and run that switch via PoE as well. But you have to consider voltage drop over that distance and more than likely have special power supplies to drive both the switch and device.

I would personally use fiber for the run and run low voltage power lines for the device.

[umdivx]

When we did a 600ft tower, we first tried to run a wireless link from the base to the top, as we could get access to power on top of the tower, after a while we would get drops from interference so we bit the bullet and ran fiber all the way to the top.

Nothing can beat a wired connection.

Another thing how much bandwidth are you looking at needing for this site? I've also used ethernet over cat3 converters which gave us a sustained 3.5mbps both ways.

- Josh

[M/Q]

Good point Josh, can you run PoE using those, or do you have to build special injectors?

[umdivx]

Good point Josh, can you run PoE using those, or do you have to build special injectors?

I never tried. But I am sure you can "hot wire" it and try it out.

- Josh