I'm sure some of you have seen the cat 5 to coax video baluns that let you run composite video over one of the 4 twisted pairs in a cat 5 cable. I have also seen the same thing for audio. But what I want is one that will do audio video and power all over the cat 5 cable. I was wondering, is this more than hooking wires to connectors? If that is all there is to it I can make my own easy. If there is more to it, is it all the complex that I still couldn't make them myself?
Video Balun
Only to the extent of inserting the baluns where they belong.
It's not complexity - Cat 5 cable is AWG 24, so you have to look carefully at the load current on the power pair.
Good Luck! Rich
Jaycar sells a unit that provides 2 audio and one vide channel and uses three of the pairs, a DC or low frequency AC signal won't need a balun to pass through CAT5
jaycar.com.us catalogue number QC3424
I can't judge your skill level from here.
first you need to know the characteristic impedance of the different sources,
video is typically 75 ohms, line level sound is I think usually 600ohms while loudspeaker level sound is typically 4 or 8 ohms...
The characteristic impedance of the pairs in cat-5 cables is 100 ohms
So for the sound baluns you need a 600ohm to 100 ohm audio transformer
and for the video a 75ohm to 100 ohm broadband transformer that works well right across the video bavdwidth 60Hz to-5Mhz) and that could be hard to arrange
I think video signals are also offset from ground so the DC component will need to be passed too.
there may be some trick involving capacitors and coils that they use to put the video signal into a twisted pair
Found an interesting thread in sci.electronics.design: "Any DIY balun info for S-video to Cat5"
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