Extending mic cables

[carillion]

Has any body extended mic cables for vx vs and viewstation.
for one of our clients we have, and when version 6 is loaded on the mic's behave very eraticly.
looking on the polycom site they reckon that 60 ft is the max for these cables.
if you have made extensions what cable did you use.

[tomsveraview]

To reach 60 feet you must daisy-chain two mics together on a viewstation. You end up with a 30 foot cable to a mic pod, and then a 30 foot cable to a second mic pod. This is because the polycom mic connection is actually a data bus, with one pair of wire for power and the other for a few MB of data.

To make custom cables I use CAT 5 wire and crimp RJ-9 connectors on the end (the RJ-9 connectors look like a regular phone cord connector but they are slightly smaller). I have pushed the 30 foot limit a bit but really long cables will give erratic results. Also if you didn't get the pinout correct the mics will work very strangely. Also make sure the twisted pairs are correct, if I remember one pair is the outer two pins the other pair is the inner two.

If you are using a VisualConcertFX with mic pods in version 6.0 you need to reboot the VisualConcert after disconnecting and reconnecting the mic pods; this is a known issue. The connectors on the VCFX are different, if you use a standard polycom mic cable to it it won't work right.

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1" FACE="Verdana, Arial">This message has been edited by tomsveraview on 22 May 2004</font>

[Gary Miyakawa]

An alternative might be to use "non" Polycom mics with a small mixer and go into the Aux In Mic port. At that point, there is no real cable length limit (within reason... 100-150 feet)....

Just a thought.

Gary Miyakawa

[tomsveraview]

Given the cost of a second mic pod if you don't already have one, Gary's solution will be much cheaper.