I guess that’s what I haven’t figured out yet - it’s about 200’ and I don’t have 200’ of wire laying around. I’m thinking of making dummy terminations for each end of my cat6 cable and stripping each of the pairs and twisting them together so it works as a single conductor and using that to measure.
a Gaia?
It’s a 200’ cable and the buildings each have their own connection to the power company. I suspect that the earth potential of the two buildings is quite different - I just have not figured out a way to measure it yet and not sure if there’s anything I can do to fix it even if I do confirm it.
I already have a pair of Ubiquiti airMax GigaBeams left over from a different project and agree - they perform incredibly well. I didn’t even bother aligning mine as they did 800Mbit/s just pointed in the right general direction. A trench was being dug to the studio for another reason and cable is relatively cheap so I figured I’d drop one in. Hasn’t turned out as well as I hoped. I will setup the GigaBeams one day - but the cable does occasionally sync at 1Gbps and I’m hoping that one day it just stays there :-)
As someone who grew up with 10Base2 and 10BaseT, and thought 100Mbps was amazing - it still surprises me every time I’m reminded how slow it is now. I buried a cat6 cable out to my wife’s studio and due to (I assume) some grounding issues it only syncs at 100Mbps - it works for general browsing etc., but every time we try to move some data it’s arggghhh.
It’s pre terminated pure copper direct burial cat6 from Amazon. I don’t have access to a real tester, but my cisco switch has some built in test capability and I’m not sure I fully understand the results, but it’s assessment of the cable length is pretty close and, more importantly, it shows all the pairs are the same as each other. I think that if there was some damage to the cable, it’s unlikely that it would affect all the pairs in exactly the same way. I have other weird grounding issues - like 20V between neutral and ground, even though it’s a new house and they’re properly bonded at the service entry. I had a really old transformer on the street feeding the two buildings and the power company recently replaced it - I was disappointed when this didn’t resolve all my issues.