Terminating Cat6 or 7 Flat Cables

[Richard]

Does anyone have any experience terminating flat cables rather than the more common single strand cored round ones? I have an over long flat cable that could usefully be shortened into several more useful shorter lengths. My initial research suggests that it is not impossible or for that matter overly difficult with the right plugs for stranded wire. I am wondering if this is correct in the experience of others.

[JayCeeDee]

If, by standed wire, you mean soft copper strands wrapped around a cotton core, in BT, we used to strip the insulation down, but leave some insulation on the end, otherwise it was like trying to trap the breeze, you couldn’t. This was laid over the plug and got crimped. This isn’t always feasible with some plugs needing the wire poked through a ‘tunnel’ and then crimped.

It all depends what you have got or are going to get.

[Dave Rice]

Yes, stranded is a PITA. Given the cheap cost of flat cables I’d just buy the appropriate lengths.

[Richard]

Thank you for the feed back, there were no surprises.

I over bought ending up with a thirty metre cable when subsequent experience showed that half that length would be right, The item I really wanted was on delayed delivery so I settled on the long item because it was certain to reach even if some re-routing turned out to be needed. The initial idea was to experiment with an alternative router position close to the service entry point, – an experiment that surprised me with the improved data rate that resulted. I am now awaiting the corrected length new cable this afternoon, when I will run in the new and extract the over length item which is likely to become an easy to tangle ‘spare’.

I will try to find a reliable way to coil and manage the excess until I can find a way to deploy it or have the courage to try experimenting with its excess length.

@ JayCeeDee; I do not know this exact cable structure, but I know the type you mean, stripping them back was a thankless task and using the right crimp is really the only act in town. I believe they were called Litz wires, there is some really fascinating theory that went into their construction – too much for me on a Sunday afternoon. Soldering could with luck be made to work after a fashion, but the result was then brittle and always prone to failure unless some very good support design relieved the stress.

I suspect this is using slightly heavier fine wires without the cotton carrier. I know that special crimping plugs are needed. Having read the references I found, this cable may also use those same types of wires for much the same reasons Liz was developed in the first place.

 

[Dave Rice]

Stranded is used to achieve a tighter bend radius, so it’s found in patch leads. It’s totally useless for punch down keystone jacks or patch panels.

I spent this morning making a wall mounted 12 port patch panel for the workbench. 4 ports to the main house LAN, 4 to the Test LAN and one for the workshop PC (so that it can be simply patched to either network).  That meant some jiggery pokery coaxing Cat 5e round some tight corners and into the switches.

The Test LAN has it’s own router who’s WAN port connects to the House LAN and on to the internet. Now I can have all sorts of devices, including PoE, on the bench and test the effect of double NAT on my network designs. The router is a cheap and cheerful (£20) TP-Link WR841N and does all I need. The best thing is I can change it’s IP subnet in 2 seconds and it automatically changes the DHCP pool to suit. The antenna are 5db so it’s range is pretty decent too. I can be sat in the 1st floor living room watching the telly and testing kit at the same time ?

[Richard]

Yes it was for that reason and the ability to get it through tight spaces that I bought the stuff, not for ‘structured cabling’ in any way shape or form. The new cable arrived this afternoon, it has been run in allowing the old one to be extracted and coiled up, the coiling up being a feat in its own right. There is no longer a coil of 15 metres of spare cable taped to the back of a piece of furniture, just a 30 metre coil looking for a new home and being quite hard to handle so that it does not unwrap. It is part of the price of having service entry and the office where the current ‘cable centre’ as it exists so far  apart. If I was starting from a clean sheet, or even reworking the present arrangements this is not what I would choose. However, this is not the time to think about any reworking.

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