100 feet works fine... haven't tried further.

I have seen 100ft used successfully ( not my installation) but I would not personally attempt further...because of the characteristics of wire and potential ohms/resistance increase -I think you would easily introduce problems of the stability of the commands taking effect over the protocol..just a good guess.

Thanks for the responses


robert

I use a 100' lanc cable without any problem. Don't know what cable resistance would do at 200' though. Worth a try.

Jack
VideOccasions

I soooo wish my camera had LANC.

Actually, the cable resistance is probably not the big issue - the last time I looked (which was quite a while ago), the LANC ran at 9600 baud - at that speed, the bigger issue is what the capacitance of the cable is (and noise around it) as well as what the driver and receiver end look like. Some terminations do a good job of handling signals like that while others fall flat on their face (typically, if you can get away with slowing the rise and fall times of the signals a bit, you can get more distance - it is the fast rise/fall times that generate all sorts of strange things). I guess what I am saying here is some things may work with a 300' cable just fine while others are not reliable with a 20 foot cable ... "it depends" (and if the cable is next to power cables etc, it is more likely to be not reliable).

mikey

Yep, on the nose Mikey!

"the last time I looked (which was quite a while ago), the LANC ran at 9600 baud "

Faint echos at the back of my memory tell me that 9600 baud was once the "high speed" data rate for dial up telephone connections for things like facsimile (fax). In those days telephone lines and exchanges (local offices in the US) were all passive (no electronics). So in principle, you could run a LANC for many miles if all the above is true.

Edit

A bit more is coming back to me. The symbols in the 9600 baud were multi level, not binary. Is LANC binary or multi level?

Really appreciate the feedback, thanks guys.

A quick Google search on the LANC protocol turned up several interesting sites including:
http://www.boehmel.de/lanc.htm
http://esac.org.uk/SonyLancControl.asp

One of the critical items here I had sort of forgotten (yes, it is 9600 baud) is that the signal is bi-directional wired-or configuration - there is a pull-up resistor and either end can pull the signal low. The down side of that goes back to what I was mentioning about line capacitance and other issues and the longer the line you have (more capacitance / noise), the more problems you are likely to have. All this means that it is not very "robust" and is going to be somewhat unpredictable as to how far you can send/receive the signal reliably.

If you really want to be able to control something with LANC over any distance, there are a number of projects out there with single chip microprocessors that can handle the task - basically, you need to convert the LANC to a different format that can be sent over a distance with a more robust communication format and let the little micro project located next to the camera handle the LANC. (there are a number of those projects out there you can find via Google if you are interested).

For those actually interested in building something, check out the stuff ELM electronics in Canada has - they have some pre-programmed chips that do things like LANC to RS232, Time Lapse via LANC etc. http://www.elmelectronics.com/thehome.html#AV (I have no connection with them, just keep finding their stuff interesting).

mikey

Always late to the party... but for what its worth I've run LANC control cable using long headphone cable extensions with 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapters, male to female, over 300 ft successfully. My camera is a Sony HVR-s270 and the LANC controller is a Sony RM-1000bp

Yeah but that signal that went for miles to the telephone exchange from your mode, were FSK or PSK encoded tones, not the +/- DC of the direct RS232 signalling.

geoff