BNC Snakes

[eshop]

Is it possible to convert the 75ohm BNC interface to 110ohm balanced using a suitable high bandwidth, high quality balun, effectively allowing the use of less expensive CAT5e/6 cable between Stage & FOH Rack?
If Digi has never experimented with this in the shop, may I suggest that you do.
You will likely not suggest or recommend to do this in any mission critical environment, however would you consider publishing the specs on the proprietary snake protocol in the Venue such as bandwidth requirements, data bitrates, etc......or perhaps recommend performance specs on a suitable balun that an end user can EXPERIMENT with?
Perhaps this is not possible at all, please advise.

Thanks for your time.

[Craig F]

take the 75 ohm cable they do spec and reverse engineer from there

[eshop]

I've been checking out the specs on the 75ohm coax Digi recommends, but this only tells half the story. No CAT5e/6 currently has a bandwidth of over 1.5Ghz, in fact the fastest in this class is Belden 7851 CAT6e which is good to 600Mhz. Seriously, If one were to design a CAT5e/6 solution based on the coax cable specs alone - I think the answer to this would be IMPOSSIBLE. Even the best baluns only operate to nearly 900Mhz, sacrificing LF performance under 300Mhz which is where I think this snake actually operates. It would be critical to know the signal and circuit specs, bitrates, bandwidth etc....in addition to the cable specs to effectively design a solution. If a commercially available balun & CAT5e/6 combination can't be had to satisfy the snake circuit (Tx - cable - Rx), one would be left to build one from parts. Mini Circuits offers numerous RF transformers to build such a beast - again if the signal specs were published by Digi - this would make it easier to design.
I read somewhere that the snake circuit is similar to MADI (AES10) but different. In that case, shouldn't a balun and cable combo that adheres to SMPTE 259M digital video which is good to 270Mbs be more than adequate?
If I come up with a working solution I'll post back.

[grindx]

While it is still coax, the company I work for, Clark Wire & Cable, offers a less expensive alternative to the Belden cable. We are also Digi approved for our RG6 and Mini coax. (500' and 250' cables respectively).

Ask for Tom
(800)222-5348

[eshop]

I have a Venue Profile running over a UTP cable construction with no failures. This setup has been road tested for 18 months and the prototype is currently still touring North America. Without trying to sound like I'm being promotional....If anyone is interested, you can hit me up at:

VoverUTP (at) gmail (dot) com