C
Cliff
Guest
On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:27:36 GMT, "Gary H. Lucas"
<gary.lucas@verizon.net> wrote:
<gary.lucas@verizon.net> wrote:
"Bill Roberto" <upnrunning@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:Ba7hf.1357$A23.374@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net...
I had to make a communication cable for a customer today. I went to Orvac's
and asked for 100' feet of 4 wire shielded cable. The salesman said he went
to a 3 day wire seminar from Beldon Cable. They claim that twisted wire
will work as good or better than shielded cable. I asked why and he said
that any noise picked up by one wire gets cancelled out by being wrapped
around the other wires. I figured that would probably be true for any
electromagnetic noise but what about RF noise? He didn't know, so I bought
the shielded because I don't want to experiment on a customer. Has anyone
used twisted wire cable for communications?
Bill,
Good call. I believe you would have been very unhappy with just twisted
pair. Twisted pair has replaced shielded wire in many applications, that
were designed for twisted pair. Yes the cancellation does occur because
both wires tend to pass through fields equally. However the circuitry must
be designed for balanced signals to take advantage of that. I've done some
installation work with large twisted pair cables for Ethernet. The thing I
find interesting is that in a 25 pair cable each pair has the twist at a
different rate! One pair will twist say 2 times per inch while the one
along side twists at 1-1/12 times per inch. This is supposed to reduce the
crosstalk between pairs.
You are of course aware that the shield gets grounded at only one end. This
may be somewhat difficult to determine unless you use an ohm meter to find
out what is connected on the computer end and what is connected at the
machine end. Since most ELECTRONICS engineers seem to have a difficult time
grasping the concepts of good SIGNAL shielding in a POWER (machine)
environment, this is nearly universally done wrong.
Gary H. Lucas