Wireless connections are cool and all, but sometimes you just need a bit of copper. This interesting article on SV Seeker discusses the various ways of making a tether for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). They experimented with a number of different cables, including gel-filled Cat 5 designed for burial and wrapping the cable in polypropylene rope to keep it protected and buoyant. They also looked at using a single core solid coax cable with an Ethernet to coax converter on either end wrapped in stretch webbing. The upside of using coax would be the length: it can handle over a mile of cable, which should be more than enough for this project. The downside is that they found that the coax stretches under strain, messing with the signal.
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The project seems to be on hiatus at the moment, but there is lots of food for thought here for anyone looking to send data over a long distance. I’m looking to put a webcam in an owl box in my back yard, and I hadn’t come across some of the options they cover here, so I’ll be looking into direct bury rated Cat 5 myself.
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