With A Good Cable Equalizer, An Engineer Can Go Far In This World
by Mark Sauerwald, Applications Engineer, MTS, National Semiconductor Corporation
Virtually every problem has a solution. Unfortunately, as anyone who has had the problem of a worn clutch on their expensive sports car can tell you, sometimes those solutions can be very expensive. A common problem that engineers have is sending data from one place to another. For a little data, over a little distance, this is no big problem, but as the data rate gets larger and the distance longer, the problem becomes more challenging.
The most cost effective manner of transporting data is through copper cable, and relatively low cost cable can be used to get moderate amounts of data transported over moderate distances. For example, the CAT-3 cable in your home is very inexpensive and perfectly adequate for carrying the amount of data that is used in a telephone conversation over the distances typically encountered within a home. If we wanted to increase the data rate to what is required for the television content, then we would find that the distances over which CAT-3 cable can be used rapidly drops to something which no longer works across the home. The solution is to use a better grade (read more expensive) cable.
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