brent Man you know a lot about wiring.
Learned by doing, making and correcting mistakes, learning from the internet, like everybody else, beginning back in the day setting up small residential and business wifi networks when wifi was still new. A little bit of formal training (e.g. basic Cisco certification) but not much. Mostly plugging along solving problems.
Most recently, I planned, installed and maintained a 19-router, seven-building distributed wifi network for the railroad. Getting good signal (my standard was -60 dBm or better) throughout each of the buildings, dodging metal roofs, metal and wood-clad walls, metal storage areas and industrial shop machinery, and getting workable signal outside to the summer volunteers with campers in "Volunteer Village" (my standard was -70 dBm or better inside each camper within line-of-sight through a camper window, with half or more of the campers at -60 dBm), was a joy in heaven, I can tell you. Dead zones to work around everywhere.
I just happened to catch your remark about "the $10, 50ft telephone cord experiment", which reminded me of DSL installations and the need for twisted pair DSL cable. Sheer dumb luck or maybe me actually paying attention for once. Good luck with the project and I hope it works out for you.
Axios Cable people use cat-5 because they can find it easier but anything above cat-5 is overkill and waste of money.
Agree, although it is getting harder to run over to Home Depot and pick up a 500/1000-foot roll of Cat-5e. Everything is going Cat 6. I guess that bandwidth demands might be driving that trend. I don't know. I'm glad to be able to say that I've done my last network and am out of the game at this point.
