Data cable requirements

I posted this on "equipment" but it quickly got buried!

Hi folks, a few of you may remember me. A few years ago, I was really into astronomy. My wife's illness forced me to stop. Well, my wife passed away. My fiance and I have purchased some land in the Sierras and will be building a house on it. It's got a HUGE southern facing lot about five hundred feet up the mountain. I have conduit installed to the pad from the house site. I'll be pulling power cable in soon and wanted to know this: If I wanted to remote operate/view with a telescope, what kind of cable should I pull in for later use. I'll probably be getting a 14" cat or nice refractor later. It'd be the cat's meow to sit down in the warm house and collect images from the scope!

I would pull Cat5 Network cable. You can run GIGABit over it later if you want and it's cheap. But don't run it with the elec. It needs it's own conduit and should be ran 18" or more away. I hope this helps.
Dark Skies
Merlin J Raymond
SSMO

I can't wait to start observing up there. All those years at Six Flags over motorhome at Pinos made me kind of jaded about the crowd thing. It'll be unreal to have a dark sky site of our own with no lights, no chance for intrusion at all.

Our land, soon to be homesite. http://imageevent.com/huckbb62/ourland

Ken:

The advice on the CAT5 cable is right on. Consider buying a good plug pliers. Leave yourself plenty of extra length at each end. The splice to the plug doesn't always take and you have to do it over again. Unfortunately when you have an open there's no way to tell which plug is open. So you just give it your best shot.

I've been doing this on data networks for some time. I doubt if you can find a ready made cord that is long enough to meet your needs. Consider doubling the cord length and then pulling it through the conduit at the halfway point. In that way you'll have two cables. Use one and then you'll have a spare for future growth.

As for a "pull string" the phone company use to "blow" a shuttle through the pipe. I don't know why you couldn't make a paper fan or one of those golf wiffle balls on a string and suck it through with a shop vac.

If you're going to install one of the electronic eyepieces for the guide scope consider run 1/4" coax through the pipe also. That doesn't bend as easy as the CAT5.

One last tip. Don't use 90 degree bends in the pipe. Use two 45's. A lot less chance of getting jambed up. They also make a substance that's about the consistency of the white paste we used in grade school. At the phone company we called it "slick'em" but I don't remember what it actually was. You just put a gob in your hand as the cable was pull through. It lubricated the casing so it would pass through the pipe easier.

Good luck

Darrell