Just got my ReefKeeper Elite setup :)

[NeveSSL]

Yep... I want black and custom sizes, too. According to DA, regular RJ-12 won't work. I'm not familiar enough with it to know personally, but supposedly (according to DA) it will fry your system if you use a regular cable.

Brandon

 

[andywe]

hmm how so? it's passive wire. Is there some magical fairy dust they use, or do they actually swap some connectors? If standard cat 5 works, then so will the flat line.

 

[NeveSSL]

No, no, no. Its all in the order of the conductors, bro.

A "straight through" cable in Cat 5e actually has one of the pairs switched out. To make a crossover, you switch out one of those pairs with another.

I'm not as familiar with telecomm, but I know its similar. This is why their cable is special. I'm not sure how a straight-through phone line would normally be, but there's is straight through without any switching of pairs.

Brandon

 

[sandalscout]

I understand the reason to want to make your own, makes sense.... I've just made too many network cables to give a crap anymore! hahaha....

Brandon, if it is "unique" then simply looking at the order of the wires in the connectors would show you quickly enough what's special about them.

 

[NeveSSL]

Yeah, I've actually already made some with some Cat5e. They are truly straight-through which makes them really easy to crimp. I took my multimeter to them to make sure... :lol: I think the confusion comes in with other standards that have exchanged pairs.

Brandon

 

[andywe]

That sounds more logical. The only other thing would be native Ohm resistence, but hionestly with wire this thin and the load so small(damm near picovolts) that it wouldn;t matter.

 

[NeveSSL]

I very seriously doubt it hits picovolts... probably a couple of millivolts, though. Even dynamic microphones put a couple of millivolts (about 20mv at speaking level, up to 140mv at loud speaking level), and they're as basic of a transducer as you can get! If they were dealing with picovolts, things would get hairy quickly for many reasons, noise and resistivity possibly at the top.

I seriously doubt they have a specific resistance on those cables as it would be costly, or at least a huge deviation from the norm (which is also costly... lol). Not to mention others have reported using Cat5e with their RKE systems without any issues.

Brandon