Experience with Startech USB Extenders?

[Humphry]

Hi all,

I recently purchased the USB2004EXT2 from a member, and am having trouble with anything more than 20m of CAT5.

I was sure it is just a quality issue (it's just standard no frills CAT5) - but when I plug in the same cable to my PC's LAN, it successfully gets a lighting fast ethernet connection. Plug it into the startech and it holds successful connection for a few seconds then drops. My pinout is standard. No noisy machinery. UTP cat5e.

What length cat5 have you gotten away with? Does it ever drop connection? Does quality of cable affect the connection that much that I can't get more than 20m?

[norty303]

I use 50m usually but have used up to 75m with no problem. Have had the odd drop but nothing a power cycle of the receiver hasn't fixed. I put it down to dodgy connection in the RJ45 which is why I run multiple runs.
I use cat5e stranded cable and they should be crossover. Use a decent tester rather than relying on LAN working correctly as an indicator the cable us ok. Ethernet only uses some the cores whereas the Startech uses all of them.

[norty303]

Check with some other cables, if they're all bad then you need to look elsewhere. If they work ok, I'd suspect it's your 20m cable.

[White-Light]

I recently discovered some issues in my LAN Network (PC rather than Startech extended).

All I used was a cheap LAN Tester and a long Telephone patch cable to complete the loop (you have to connect the sender to the remote unit via Rj11 cabling as well as LAN to create a loop).

I think the LAN tester was identical or very similar to this one:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/rj45-and-r...e-tester-n21cl

It basically sends a signal down each twisted pair in turn and reports whether its received or not using the LED's. It will also check your modem RJ11 cable although in your usage that's irrelevant.

Obviously if you have any LEDS out, then the cable either needs to be re-terminated at each end it turn until a perfect signal is reported or discarded and replaced if a perfect signal can't be obtained (most likely internal damage to the cable in that case).