Coax Cables 75 Ohm  -  Analog Video, Digital Video, S/PDIF



Table of Coax Cables (Attenuation, Impedance, Capacity)



COAX Cables

Coaxial cable is a shielded one-conductor cable with the conductor embedded in a di-electricum, which is wrapped in foil or a braided shield. It is called coaxial because it includes one physical channel that carries the signal, surrounded by a layer of insulation and by another concentric physical channel, both running along the same axis.



Insertion Loss of Coax Cables / Cable Attenuation

The attenuation (power loss) of coax cables is defined by the loss in dB per unit length at a given frequency. The loss rises with the length of the cable and with the frequency. But with rising frequency the actual loss is not linearly dependent upon the frequency.

The loss is added by 1) resistive loss, 2) dielectric loss and 3) radiated loss.

The resistive loss within the cable depends on conductor resistance and flowing current. The loss results in heat being dissipated. The resistive loss increases as the square root of the frequency. The area through which the current flows in the conductor is limited by the skin effect. With AC currents flowing through cables at higher frequencies, the skin effect is coming more and more into account the higher the frequency is. Cables carrying high frequency signal act as low pass filters. The resulting loss in the high frequency part is called insertion loss. To prevent this often multi-stranded conductors are used respectively the conductive area of the cable are increased resulting in larger diameters.

The dielectric loss increase linearly with frequency but is independent of the size of the cable. The dielectric loss also dissipates as heat.

The radiated loss is the least important because only a very small amount of power is radiated from the cable.

As resistive loss increases as the square root of frequency and dielectric losses increase linearly, the resistive loss dominates at lower frequencies and the dielectric loss dominates at higher frequencies.



typical insertion loss curve

Because of the insertion loss of the cable digital video signals must be recovered after being transmitted over longer cable runs. This can be performed by pre-emphasis at the start point of the cable or by adding equalization to the receiver at the end of the cable. For the use of pre-emphasis the cable characteristics and the cable length must be known. Equalization can be done with adaptive cable equalizers that is controlling the amount of equalization by a feedback loop through the cable. With active equalization systems not only the signal but also noise is amplified. Pre-Emphasis and Equalization is done by increasing the high frequency part according the insertion loss of the cable to finally get a more or less linear signal again.



Connectors
1.0-2.3 Mini Coax Connector 75 Ohm     Video, digital Video
1.6-5.6 Coax Connector 75 Ohm     Video, digital Video
BNC Video, digital Video
TNC Video, digital Video
Twinax Twinax
Triax  
Video, digital Video



Maximum Length of Coax Cables for digital Transmission in Meter

Signal: Composite NTSC
SMPTE 170M
Composite PAL Component SMPTE 259M Component
Wide-screen
HDTV
SMPTE 292M
Bandwidth: 143 Mb/s 177 Mb/s 270 Mb/s 360 Mb/s 1.5 Gb/s
Type:
0.51/2.4 225m 198m 183m 160m 49m
0.58/2.6 300m 265m 240m 209m 60m
0.6/2.8 322m 280m 255m 220m 65m
0.6/3.7 255m 275m 220m 190m 60m
0.8/3.7 430m 380m 340m 295m 90m
0.8/4.9 425m 365m 295m 250m 80m
1.0/4.8 540m 480m 405m 350m 110m
1.0/6.6 525m 470m 400m 345m 105m
1.4/6.6 715m 635m 535m 465m 145m
1.6/7.3 785m 700m 590m 510m 160m
= Diameter of Inner Copper Wire / Diameter of Insulation