cmarcus

second sentence should read "...noise floor..." not "...ground floor..."

Joel, EuroDriver had a good post here about one of these devices. I like the FMC-1000S from CTC. cmarcus

Chris - I'm late to this party, but just came across this article. I'm rather confused by the choice of using the AQ Vodka Ethernet cable for reducing the ground floor when your description of the setup indicates it isn't properly grounded. There are two primary reasons for using Cat7 in a setup such as yours; each twisted pair has more turns per inch which can eliminate crosstalk and interference better than cat5e or cat6 and cat7 has a lot of shielding to protect from RF and EM interference. However, in your setup you don't seem to be taking advantage of the shielding by not having either ethernet cable plugged into a device with a shielded jack that is connected to earth ground. From the Motorola cable modem through the Baaske MI to the Cisco SG-200-26, no where in this path is there a jack that gets tied to earth ground. So rather than providing shielding against RFI or EMI, you could actually be picking up more interference since this shield is now an antenna (I will admit, this highly unlikely and if it did occur would probably be addressed by the tight twists of Cat7). What strikes me as odd is that someone from AQ helped you out with this and they never mentioned the importance of grounding!?!? If you really want to reduce the noise floor across a link, drop copper altogether. A fiber connection is immune to RFI and EMI since there is no electrical signal across fiber. And you get the added bonus of electrical isolation - if one device gets zapped by a lighting strike, there's no chance of that voltage traveling across the fiber and hitting the other device. Based on a real quick search, the fiber options would cost at least half of using two AQ'S and a Baake - Eth to fiber adapters are sub $100 these days. cmarcus