km@EMORY.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg) (03/13/86)
A contractor is doing Appletalk cabling for us. He bought the cable
from Belden, and contacted Apple to by connectors. Apple tells
him that it is impossible to buy connectors themselves. If you need
only a handful of connectors, you must buy a $650 cable kits which
includes 26 connectors and 100 meters of cable.
This seems absurd. Does anyone know a way around it.
Ken Mandelberg
Emory University
Dept of Math and CS
Atlanta, Ga 30322
{akgua,sb1,gatech,decvax}!emory!km USENET
km@emory CSNET
km.emory@csnet-relay ARPANETeric@PLUS5.UUCP (Eric W. Kiebler) (03/17/86)
There is nothing special about the connectors unless you want to remain totally appletalk compatible. I made one using phono plugs that worked just fine. It took the company I was working with 2 months to get cables from Apple just so we could look to see what they were like. Long story short, we used good Belden shielded cable, phono plugs, and db-9's and everything worked just damn swell. We only ran the cable about 25 meters, though... Cheers, eric PS. They talk about capacitance and resistance recommendations, and they are pretty important on heavily loaded nets, but we had about 5 stations on and had *no* problems.
dms@HERMES.AI.MIT.EDU (David M. Siegel) (11/26/86)
Does anyone know where I can order the connectors that go on to an appletalk cable? Apple only sells them with a spool of the cable, at a very high price. Are these standard connectors that can be ordered directly from an alternative vendor? Thanks, -Dave
hsu@ENEEVAX.UMD.EDU (Dave Hsu) (11/26/86)
Although I haven't looked, it seems to me that SOMEBODY must carry the
3-pin micro-DINs.
We decided pretty early that the custom cabling kit was just not worth
going for, and also that building little transceiver boxes wasn't for
us either. And so, we bought a spool of the blue-jacketed Belden twinax
that looked pretty close to Appletalk cable specs (although the Belden
offered better shield coverage; this was NOT the cable that Belden now
sells specifically for Appletalk), a bunch of XLR (microphone) connectors,
and spliced them directly to the short Appletalk cables that came with
the standard kit. So what we have at each end is...
=====================<>---------[]---------<>======================
Belden Male Female Male Female Belden
inline XLR's ^ inline XLR's
|
Appletalk box to Mac,
Now, why half male/half female on the cut-in-half 6' cable (which is
male/male)? Some of our macs move around a bit, so at each temporary
location, we left a ceiling to desk drop of Belden with the XLR's
snapped together. So far, no problems.
-daverth@lll-lcc.ARPA@well.UUCP (Robert Hughes) (12/05/86)
There is a company in San Marcos that sells both the 3 pin and 8 pin connector for the Mac+. C Enterprises 310 Via Vera Cruz, Suite 110 San Marcos, CA 92069 619-744-8182