During the past years, there has been a growing interest in simplifying the cabling required to deploy door entry systems. The need for such a reduction is mainly based on the increasing cost of copper in one hand, along with the target of reducing labour costs in the other: the less wiring a system requires the fastest and reliable the installation is.

To fulfil this demand, FERMAX and other door entry systems manufacturers offer nowadays non-polarised two-wires systems, capable of multiplexing power, audio, video, and the required control signals into just two conductors.

Although an overall installation cost reduction has been met, the electronic devices involved in such systems have seen their prices rise. The fewer the wires, the more the electronics are sophisticated, thus their cost.

So at present, an installer may choose among:

a) Cost effective off-the-shelf technology, requiring a complex installation (many wires, many time, many errors),
b) Higher cost modern products, yet enabling minor installation costs (2 wires and no errors, since they have no polarity)

Now that installation cost reducing pressure has increased to the level of moving the industry into the 2 wires technology, it is time to explore a third option complementary to those mentioned above.

The third way is to keep on installing convenient-cost current-technology, such as VDS in the case of FERMAX, but with low performance wiring instead of complying with traditional cable specifications.
This has been the main reason which pushed the technical department in performing the full test for the characterisation of the VDS system with CAT5 cable.

Of course, this alternate model implies lowering maximum system ratings based on traditional 1~2.5 mm^2 wires. This paper seeks describing the performance of FERMAX ADS systems using the popular CAT5 cable.

We have tested the VDS system in two phases.
First, we have studied the performance of an audio installation, where the constraining factor is the distortion of the data signal spread through the installation branched.

Once the limit for an audio setup has been met, we have transformed the installation into a video one where the bounds to the system operation are imposed by the dropping power voltage through thin wires as well as by the video signal transmission capacity of CAT5 conductors.

In the following table we have summarised the conclusions of this studying which allowed us to redact the VDS Tender Specs on CAT5 cable:

In the following link you can download all the details related to the process and therefore to the result of the performed test:

http://docweb.fermax.com/docs/descargas/TEX_VDS_System_on_CAT5_cable.zip

We hope you will find out the information you need for exploring this option which we believe will open a possible new market.