Cat5e vs Phone Wire

[Guest guest]

A couple months ago (which seems like an eternity now) when I was doing research on the LOR system, I was reading all the threads here, on the Wiki, and the LOR site. Somewhere, I thought I read that it made no difference whether Cat5e cable or telephone wire could be used to connect the controllers to each other. On the Wiki, I just noticed it says that phone wire can be used, but with reduced features. Now, I can't find the chatroom thread that was talking about this (I thought it said that it made no difference which was used). Can someone point me to this thread or clarify what features are not available if phone wire is used? Since phone wire is cheaper than Cat5e cable, I was planning to use that, but if this results in reduced features, I would like to order Cat5e cable while the sale is still in progress.

Denny

[Guest guest]

You need a cat-5 from the computer to the controller chain. And you only can use phone cable every-other controller becausee they each ol;y have ONE hookup for phone. It would be alot easier to just use cat-5. But Yes, phone does have all the features as cat-5.




--Daniel L

[Guest guest]

Daniel: Now that you mention it, I remember seeing that on the controller. Duh!

Well, I have all this phone cable coming now; has anyone ever used one of those phone splitters that plugs into the wall outlet and allows one to plug in two phones? Could one of these be plugged into the controller and be used as an input from one controller and as an output to the next controller? Would that work? I have a 200 foot wide front yard and about fifty feet from the street to the house. I was planning to use the phone wire for the really long runs between controllers.

[Guest guest]

I think Dan had said that splitting did not work that well. And that was with the cat5. And I dont know how the in/out for the phone works. LOR only uses 4 of the 8 wires in the cat5 and all 4 in the phone. What you could do is cut off the phone connectors and crimp on the ethernet connectors. But I could not tell you how the wires go.....




---Daniel L

[Guest guest]

You can't split the the signal via splitters, etc., with LOR. It's best to simply run a longer cable. You can easily run 1000ft or more with CAT5 cable ... which should give you plenty of distance.

[Guest guest]

Daniel wrote:

You need a cat-5 from the computer to the controller chain. And you only can use phone cable every-other controller becausee they each ol;y have ONE hookup for phone. It would be alot easier to just use cat-5. But Yes, phone does have all the features as cat-5.




--Daniel L

That's not true. The OUT jack can be used with either a CAT5 cable or with phone wire, so to connect controllers with phone wire you run from the RJ-45 OUT jack (even though it's an 8-pin jack a phone wire connects fine and just uses the inner 4 pins) to the IN phone jack of the next controller in line.

-jim-