Hello All, I am currently building 4

[techman3030]

Hello All,
I am currently building a house and am in the process of pulling my cable. beffore I buy my equipment can you guys recommend some equipment? I am pulling everything to a home run location and would like to have an all in one package of some type for cable, network, and phone distribution. I have looked at a few options, but you guys impress me constantly, so I thought I would ask for some opinions. here is what I will have
1 dsl modem for internet
12 cable drops - for tv only
10 - 12 network drops
12 phone drops
The multiple drops are for convience and the ability to change the rooms around. There will only be 6 of each at use at the same time at the most.
The only things I have locally are Radio Shack, Lowes and Home Depot.
I do have a Graybar within 75 miles that I deal with through my work though.

I appreciate any help.

 

[AV1611]

Beware of sorry cables. Make sure it is atleast Cat5E for Network. There is a Graybar in Nashville TN. Are you close to there? If so I am not sure of local vendors on that stuff. I usually order mine from out of state. I live in Murfreesboro,

AV

 

[techman3030]

Actually I forgot about The one in Nashville, it's about 120 miles away, but the one in Knoxville is still closer to me at around 75 miles. I ran cat 5e for my phones and network drops, and ran rg-6 for my cable drops.

 

[mikeydidit]

I would install everything in a small rack. This would let you patch anything you wanted and use some sort of wire management. Chatsworth makes some fairly small an inexpensive models of racks. If you terminate everything telecomm and network on a patch panel, you can use whatever jack for either, being you used the 5E cables. They also make some 19” patch panels for your RG6 that would work out nicely.

Mike Jones
LSUHSC

 

[techman3030]

The following is something I have looked at, but I'm not too sure of the brand. It's made by Leviton, what do you guys think?

http://assets.twacomm.com/pdf/5412.pdf

 

[Servamatic]

Well, my opinion is certainly biased towards Levitons SMC, since some of the products in it are of my design.
Leviton has a great line up of residential products, plus you can get much of their stuff from Home Depot which is closer to you than Graybar.

Richard S. Anderson, RCDD

http://www.smartbuilthomes.com

 

[AvayaNovice]

If you're building a new home, that should work out great. As far as your CATV is concerned, be sure to only activate the outlets you'll use, as 6 outlets already would probably be configured by using a 3 way splitter cascaded to a 4 way splitter, the 3 way being unbalanced, so you'd have about 8DB of loss at medium band on the two ports from the 3 way, and about 11DB of loss on the 4 way's ports. So I might activate the closest outlets to the 4 way, and the further away outlets to the 3 way.

Otherwise, I'm sure you'll get everything taken care of. 12 phone drops using cat 5 translates to 48 pairs. A 110 block would be perfect for that, you could then loop dialtone using jumper wire.

And... as servamatic is bias with Leviton, I am bias with ICC. I'd say get yourself a 12 port patch panel from ICC that uses a 66 block clip, terminate your cat5e to it, make sure to put a phone jack in the area where all of your cabling will be ran to, that way you can put your DSL modem in there, as well as your router, and an extra switch... and you'll be good to go. That being said, make sure you put a power outlet in there too.

So... a few splitters, a 50 pair 110 block, and a 12 port patch panel... and you're done.

Of course, you could use a premade "smarthome" panel... but that's up to you. I would think that a custom built solution would be more up your alley.

 

[techman3030]

Thanks Guys, as always you guys are all great. You gave me some things to think about. I'll check out the ICC and Chatsworth equipment and compare them with the Leviton. Thanks again.

 

[chiefred]

Hey AvayaNovice

I am interested in coaxial and how it works coming from the provider, but not sure I understood what you meant about signal loss.

also, what do you mean that "12 phone drops using cat 5 translates to 48 pairs."

Thanks

 

[AvayaNovice]

CATV coming from the "cable company" will have a varied signal level in several different categories, ie. low band, medium band, hi band, etc. Low band is typically going to be much higher in signal level than high band. If your provider offers digital cable, or HDTV, or internet services, they'll be using a digital channel with compressed data on it, typically digital 80. This channel can go all the way down to -12 or -14 and still be OK. Ideally, you'll want to see between +10 and -12 on a digital channel. There is also the FDC, or forward data carrier -- which is typically 107.50MHz. This channel is the signalling channel that dictates what goes on with packets. You'll want to see this above -12 as well.

Regular analog channels don't want to be above +20 nor do they want to be below -4. If channel 2 is -2, most likely channel 70 is going to be around -6. Reason being is that higher band channels have more difficulty with line loss, shabby fittings, and junk splitters. Most older systems didn't go above 300MHz, well, now we go all the way up to 1GHz in some cases, so older splitters cause problems.

Please let me know any specific CATV signal loss questions you might have, so that I can answer them more efficiently.

as far as 12 cat5e telephone drops making 48 pairs... 12x4=48. There are 4 pairs in teach cat5e cable. I would terminate all of them, and then cross connect what you plan on using.