Length of cable to the Red drive?

[Mike Prevette]

How long of a cable will the Red drive ship with? and theoretically how long could it be? I remember reading that on "Crossing the Line" the drive was mounted inside the cockpit of the air to air chopper. That leads me to believe at least 8 feet is possible. Is this correct?

_mike

[Nick Shaw]

I think the standard max length for an eSATA cable is 2m, so would imagine this will be the situation with the RED-DRIVE cable. Don't know if active boosters can be used.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I think it's a bit less than 2m for the entire eSATA pathway... IIRC, I think Graeme or Jarred said the cables were limited to 18" or 24". Either way, something like 8ft isn't going to happen, not with eSATA... I don't know if any form of signal booster or repeater would work.

Edit: Hmmm... Looks like a lot of eSATA solutions on the market are allowing 2m cable lengths. So I would *guess* RED should offer about the same.

[Stuart English]

Max length is a function of the diameter of the wires that can be used with the LEMO connector pins. That affects both data and signal ground integrity but also voltage drop as we are carrying 12V unregulated power as well.

The current distance of the e-SATA interface cable we supply with the camera is 18 inches. We can certainly go further than that (and we have) but we don't yet know for sure how far the maximum is - if locally powered, we probably can go 6 to 8 feet, but more experiments are required to prove this out.