atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring what cable to use for distant LCD/Plasma screen

A 5-star hotel plans to install about 17 LCD screen outside their function rooms & ball rooms (at 2nd & 3rd floor) & 2 Plasma screen at the hotel main entrance, goundfloor. Cables from the screens at each floor will run back to PCs located in a room at each floor. The PCs could not be at the rooms as space is limited. The PCs will be connected in a LAN using UTP & Fiber back to Server at IT room 2nd floor. Distance from the screens to PCs range from 10m to 150m. Can VGA or RGB cable go this length without signal degradation or loss? Any other better cables we can use, (eg.RG6 or RG11) & what is the max. efective range?
The LCD & Plasma screen also have audio. Should we run audio cable seperately or is there a 2 in 1 cable for video & audio. Need to propose to the hotel & any advise or experience is very much appreciated. Thanks & Regards.

Perhaps you need to get with someone who knows how to do this.

This is not my area of expertise however I know that you would not connect these to PC's at the distances you suggest the way you would a computer monitor.

There are many "converters" available that will take the RGB output of a video card, put it on UTP or fiber, then at the monitor end another "converter" outputs RGB to the monitor. They will handle audio as well.

Like I suggest, it sounds like you are over your head here (as I would be also). Get somebody experienced with this until you learn.

-Hal

Using shielded triple coax made specifically for VGA, you should be able to get at least 100-150 feet with a very good signal. The only way to get decent audio at that distance is to convert it to a balanced signal like pro audio uses. Regular audio signals like from a home stereo on RCA plugs or from a computer sound card is unbalanced and will pick up a lot of hum and noise. As hbiss said, converters are available so you can use cat5 cable for video and audio. Not sure about the distance for the converters.

Another option, depending on what type of screens you're using (monitor or TV) is video cards that give NTSC video output and run that into a modulator and amp, then distribute with RG6 and splitters like regular cable tv.

RG-59 baseband cable can be run to 600 feet (200 meters), and RG-6 and RG-11 baseband cable are effective to 850 feet (270 meters) and 1200 feet (400 meters), respectively. This came from the manufacture specs. However every situation is different. I like the idea that Junkman had, it sounded like it would work real good.