Do you know anythign abotu how far telephone and coax can be ran? I have two options.
1st, run another conduit down the outside wall of the garage beside the one I will run for power and bring both phone and coax up through the garage wall and down into the trench in separat conduit with the power. Run would be roughly 140 feet.
Also, I will have to run water at the end of the house. (It is in the video the long winding route between the tree and field lines to the back of the house.) I can run it in this ditch to the crawspace. Distance would be roughly 190 feet but an easier install becasue of not having to fish it inside the garage wall.
The phone will be a plain phone. The coax will be connected to my rooftop antenna on the house for local tv stations and also will be connected to an interior dish network sat box so I can watch whatever the sat box is tuned to.
If the telephone wires will be buried they have to be jell filled or water will get in and even though the insulation is OK the change in capacitance will probably kill the signal. The distance will be OK as long as the distance to the telephone office is not marginal.
Just connect the length of wire and coax you are going to use and see if they work! Leave them coiled up. Don't have to run them out to see if they will work!
Telephone wire can go for many miles, yours probably does already on the poles.
RG-6 coax loses about 3/4 of the upper channels' signal strength and half of the lower ones' per hundred feet. ( Cliffstromath, or Infinite Implausibility Drivel )
Before spendiing on the coax you could test for good reception of the weaker signal with splitters, a 2-way cuts the strength signal in half, a 4-way to 1/4. The unused outputs need terminators.
First, try to keep the conduits for the phone and TV as far from the power conduit in the common trench as you can, laterally or vertically. 6" if you must,12" is enough, over18" is overkill.
If they are too close and running parallel for long distances, the power lines can inductively couple over and give you hum problems on the phone lines, and mess up the video and computers. This is why power lines are 4 to 6 feet below Power on the pole.
(Well, that and to leave room so dumb Phone linemen aren't sticking their heads into the power lines... Been there, Saw that happen once, and the end results {Darwin Award} were not at ALL pretty...)
And {$Deity} forbid you get a lightning strike on the power lines, you don't want THOSE currents induced on the Phone or TV. Matter of fact, haveing lightning arresters on the phone and TV where they hit the shed is a good thing, and a local ground rod or two for the shop building.
Tie the ground rods at house and shop together with the power line ground wire, and don't scrimp. You don't want different ground potentials at opposite ends of the line, that can be real bad.
Make the conduits big enough to Future-Proof them - 1" minimum, 1-1/2" or 2" is better. And leave a spare pipe for the stuff they haven't even dreamed up yet, or to pull through a new cable before pulling out one of the old ones that is failing.
Telephone has no hard distance limits, but if you were going over 300' or so I'd bump up from the usual 24-gauge to 22-gauge. If it was
1000' or more, I'd go 19-gauge... And if you are already miles away from the main Switchroom, you might have to bump it up to keep the Shop phone legible - that 18,000 feet of phone cable getting to your house counts in the total voltage drop too, that's where the -48V supply and the dialtone comes from.
The gel-filled 3-pair underground phone drop wire is about 3/8" OD, and the gopher-armored direct burial stuff is pushing 3/4" OD. You don't need the armored, but if that's all you can get in-stock locally you want it to fit inside the pipe...
A 5/8" or 3/4" OD cable is NOT going inside 1/2" trade size PVC period, and with 3/4" PVC you are cutting it way too close, the sweep bends tend to oval out a little. Might go in once with a grand Tug-Of-War, and never come out again...
Get the sheath bonding clamps when you get the underground phone wire, and use them. The metal armor sheath in the phone cable needs to be bonded and grounded to the lightning arrestors at both ends.
And if you want computer networking in the Shop, they do make the same underground phone cable dual-rated as CAT-5 or 5E or6 - Run a Seperate Networking Cable, don't try to double up with the phones. You can sometimes get away with it, but never count on it...
The limit between points on a Twisted-pair Ethernet network is about
300', which will work fine - you might want to put a full Hub out in the shop to act as a repeater.
Or convert to Fiber with a Media Converter Hub at both ends, and pull through a 12-fiber cable to the Shop. The Fiber Networking uses one fiber for Tx/Rx each direction, which will give you 10 spares that you can later convert to CATV or Security CCTV, or other uses...
And they make filled underground RG-11 TV coax too, the Cable Companies use it for service drops. Again, the local big electrical wholesale houses should stock it.
The phone wires run MILES from the CO to your house. My phone run is currently 18000 feet. So, your additional 140' will be a minute addition.
The TV cable from a converter or other inside source will be plenty strong, but trying to pipe signals received from a broadcast antenna over a long cable may not work as well. You can get extra low-loss coax if you need it.
I got quite a bit of improvement with a mast mounted amp, but we're still getting a few dropouts and occasionally some channels are unwatchable.
This is the amp. It's in the attic on the largest antenna that can swing on a rotator in the space available. Overall, our reception is somewhat better than predicted by antennaweb.
DTV is RF just the same as NTSC. But note that preamps are not the same as distribution amps. And in general, you are better off with a bigger antenna.
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