tandavad

Distinguished
Dec 18, 2011
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18,510
Hello,

I have a Hughes satellite dish with a modem and a D-link router. Wireless connectivity in the house is no problem. I also have a building about 200' away from which I cannot connect wirelessly. I bought two L-com weatherproof lightning surge protectors (with RJ-45 jacks) and a 250' Cat5e outdoor burial ready ethernet cable (with RJ-45 connectors).

I ran a a 50' Cat5e ethernet cable from the router to the first surge protector, then the 250' outdoor Cat5e cable to a second surge protector, then a 25' Cat5e cable to a laptop. I know it was pushing the length a little , but everything worked fine for six months. Then the signal went dead. After isolating the problem to the the 250' run of outdoor cable and thinking I may have abused it, I ripped it out and replaced it with a brand new one--taking care to protect it better than I had on my first installation.

However, after installing the new 250' cable in the same way as I had originally done, there was still no connectivity. I went to the router and tried a 4' ethernet cable from the same router port and it worked fine with my laptop. I then went to the first surge protector and unplugged the 250' cable and replaced it with the 4' cable. It worked fine with my laptop. So the signal went from the router through the first surge protector without problem. I plugged the 250' cable back into the surge protector and went to the other building where I unplugged the other end of the 250' cable from the second surge protector and tried plugging it directly into my laptop. No signal.

Logically then, the problem is with the brand new cable that I just installed with a great amount of care and effort. Bummer. I wish I'd checked it to make sure it worked before I installed it, but hindsight is pretty worthless. However, before I rip out this brand new cable out, I thought it might be worth putting out some feelers to see if someone more knowledgeable than me might see where I've gone wrong.

A few other details. Both lightning surge protectors are well grounded to copper lightning rods and I think that the 200' distance between them should negate any ground loop problems--though I'm no expert there. Also, the 250' outdoor cable seems to be sheathed, and the RJ-45 connectors are somewhat different than the normal plastic ones. There is a wire filament coming from somewhere inside the connector that is soldered to the outer shell of the RJ-45 connectors which are part plastic and part metal. I imagine that it is some kind of grounding system. (could this have something to do with the problem?) Also from what I can see the 4' ethernet cable (which works fine with my laptop) and the 250' outdoor ethernet cable (which doesn't work at all) both seem to have the same RJ-45 wiring configurations--T568B.

I might add that I have jiggled and reseated the RJ-45 connectors in the jacks untold number of times without any success. Any help would be greatly appreciated. :fou: