Today I'm covering how to make a network cable. Most of you will be alot better off simply buying pre-made cables. Making your own cables is not the easiest or quickest thing in the world to do. These cables are using cat5 cable and use RJ45 ends. If you're looking for 802.11G cables please leave!
The maximum length for a cat5 or cat5e cable is
328 feet or 100 meters. Do not even try to use lengths longer than this. If you need to cover a distance greater than this you'll need to put a cheap little hub or a switch in place at the end of the first cable to act as a signal repeater. This distance limitation is the same for both patch and crossover cables.
What do I need?
- Crimper
- Cable
- Ends
- Time
- Patience
If you have extra for #4 and #5 you can certainly get away with a cheap crimper. The crimper I'm using is also the cheapest one that I could find. Some people swear by using expensive crimpers, but since I have had no problems at all with this cheap one I'm not going to try and push that on you guys. If you do this kind of thing professionally I'm sure you could tell a difference, but the oddball cables I've had to make here and their I doubt I'd be able to tell a difference. On cheaper crimpers you will have to put a bit more force into the crimping process, but that's the only thing I've noticed.
Patch cables are also known as straight through cables. To do this you can connect a 568A end to a 568A end OR a 568B end to a 568B end. They must be the same on both ends.
Crossover Cables are generally what you use to connect one computer to another without using a switch. It has some other uses but I won't go into them here. To make one you will need to have one end of your cable using the 568A wiring and the other end using the 568B wiring.
This diagram is with pin 1 on the left and the tab facing you with the cable entering the bottom part of the end.
