tandavad
New Member
I have a shielded, outdoor ethernet cable running between two rural buildings. The Cat5 cable is shielded with a metallic sheath and has a drain line running through it to both ends for grounding purposes. I bought two L-Comm weatherproof lightning surge protectors and installed one at each end of the 250' cable. There are two shorter Cat5 cables connected to the lightning protectors which go on into each building. There are also grounding wires going from each lightning surge protector to a grounding rod located at each building. The system worked fine for about six months, then became erratic, and finally stopped working. After testing to see where the signal was interrupted, I came to the conclusion that the cable was defective and replaced it with a new one which, frustratingly, did not work either. After a lot more testing, I finally isolated the problem somewhat more specifically. If I disconnect the grounding wires from both lightning protectors, the signal goes right through from a router in one building to a computer in the other building. If I reconnect either one of the grounding wires the line is dead at the far end. I got conflicting advice about whether to ground both protectors (the issue being ground loops), but the company told me to ground both of them as they were 250' apart. Technical support at L-Comm has no idea what the problem is and advised me that they may have been damaged by lightning and to buy new ones (at about $70.00 each). I'm reluctant to do this when the signal runs through the lightning protectors just fine without the ground wires being connected to them. It seems to me that there might be a simple solution that no one has thought of. Any suggestions to this grounding problem would be appreciated