Extending the Range of Profibus .

Alan Bollard, Westermo

Profibus DP has limitations in terms of the transmission range possible over the standard purple twisted pair cable. At 12Mbit/s for instance you can only achieve 200m which can quickly disappear through non direct cable routes. Fibre optic cable is one option which can provide ranges up to 40km and also then allow a redundant ring solution to be created. Another technique is to use modems, line drivers of radio, but then the problem occurs about how to put 12Mbit/s data rates into low capacity high latency links. We will explore some of the solutions to these problems for Profibus DP during this presentation.