I'm talking about the usual RS485 front-end: MAX485, series resistors (if any), pull-up/pull-down and termination resistor.
The system I'm working on has two RS485 transceiver at both ends of a twisted-pair cable. Its length is between 250 m and 500 m.
I'm wondering how to dimension the resistors' values. With "standard" values (4k7 pull-up/down, 220 termination, 10 series) I get a distorted signal from side to side, due to the cable length I guess.
Get rid of the 4.7K and series 10 keep the terminator. Make sure the terminator should be 220. Make sure there is a decent ground for the signals. RS-485 is really a 3 wire system 2 signal one ground.
Usually, for UTP connections, the termination resistors are more like
120R, which matches the typical characteristic impedance of a twisted pair.
Biasing to define the idle state (assuming the reciever does not pre-empt this by having a controlled built-in offset voltage) is typically done with two resistors, one from A (let's say) to Vdd, and one from B (let's say) to GND. In order to get a couple hundred mV you need a fairly large current given the termination resistors (60R for two in parallel, usually), so values like 680R or 620R are common.
Since the two bias resistors are effectively in series with each other and in parallel with the termination resistor from the pov of the UTP, ideally you'd like to increase the termination resistor a bit, maybe to 133R, but often people don't bother.
For short runs, and low speeds, termination is not very important; almost anything works. You do need to establish a common ground between transmitter and receiver or you'll have problems.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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From a transmission POV, 135 Ohms is usually used at and below 56 kbit/s. From there to 1.544 Mbit/s about 110 Ohms is good, so your 100 Ohms should be fine.
I write here, but my answer is for all the others, whom I thanks too of course.
I'm not sure the ground is actually *common*. The cable may have a length of more 450 m. Both transceivers have a DCDC converter to isolate the ground: digital lines are optocoupled.
This is the previous design, working now. I have to redesign the whole system so if I can improve the serial communication it will be appreciated.
Let's say the maximum speed I can reach with this configuration is only
19200 bps. I need more.
Furthermore, the cable is very complex it carries several coaxial cables, optical fibers, ecc... So I don't know if its impedance is about
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