Can Any one recommend a good 300’ Cat5e cable for the Dlive that is not necessarily “approved”?
or is that not recommended all together?
Hi @lishinsky,
Copper CAT5e cables in excess of 100m are unlikely to work I’m afraid - the IEEE 802.3ab standard has a maximum cable length of 100m.
For cable runs in excess of 100m we’d usually suggest a fibre connection although it is possible that you could use 2x pieces of active network hardware to act as “repeaters” in conjunction with 3x 100m cable runs. However the fibre option would probably be more convenient and would introduce fewer potential points of failure.
See this topic from last summer. I did an install with 250’ CAT 6 shielded plus a jack reel 100’ of CAT 5 for the stage. Worked fine. QU32 and AB168. Some others in the thread did tests over 400’ with good results.
https://community.allen-heath.com/forums/topic/cat6-maximum-length
Thank you so much for clarifying this,
So when dealing with 100m cables how important it is to use the recommended and approved by Allen and Heath cables?
@lishinsky
It is not imperative to use on of our approved cables, but they are the only ones we can guarantee to work as the specification of the cables is fixed and will not change.
In theory any good “touring grade” quality CAT5e/6/7 cable should suffice but ideally you want to try before you buy, or buy from somewhere with a good returns policy, so you can ensure that it works as expected.
I should add that although @gcumbee has had success with >100m cable runs, it is not something we support so you would be going above 100m at your own risk.
Thanks again, actually im not planning to exceed 100m, in my initial post i meant 300 feet ( 300’ ). Its the brand i was worried about.
We are using RapcoHorizon’s DURASHIELD-278NN cable. It’s 278’ works great.
I did an experiment with cheap outdoor (gel filled) unshielded CAT5e cable that was 128m. It worked nice and stable.
ddff
I’ve run 350 ft. of TMB Pro-plex on my iLive with no issues.
-Mark