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Broadcast Engineers Advice!
Hi Folks,
I currently work at a very small local TV channel in the UK. We are in the process of moving from our current location to a college.
Now, as part of this move all the broadcast servers etc need to be moved from our TX server room to a new room at the college. This has all been finalised and is going ahead – however, our broadcast partner has decided that they cannot supply their encoder and distribution in the room that the broadcast kit is going to go. They will however, put their kit in an IT server room some 400mtrs away.
It has been suggested by our supplier that they recieve a “baseband signal” to their encoder and then, they will allow us to broadcast once the move is complete.
As this is such a huge distance for us – and considering that we have a shoestring budget – it has been suggested that we look at sending our analogue signal down Cat5e cable and then into their encoder for distribution. I know this will not produce a broadcast quality signal – but the current signal going into our suppliers encoder is composite video – would using this cat5e cable diminish the signal that much, the viewer noticed the difference?
I’ve asked for us to use coax for video signal – but our MD thinks this will cost too much and would rather go down the cat5e cable route as they feel it is more cost effective…
Cheers
DC
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1 Reply
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Running 400 metres of composite video without any amplification is extremely optimistic, whether it is coax or CAT5E. Unless there are several amplifiers involved along the way, yes, the viewer is going to notice alot of difference. The signal will probably be unusable. 400 metres is too long even with SDI. I think you can run a 400 metre cable stretch with an SD-SDI signal if you reclock the signal, but I believe that is the maximum distance. I have no engineer education, but the way I see it, you need to go fibre.
Aleksander Steffensen
Steffensen Multimedia
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