Recommendations on a truly grounded HDBase-T extender?

Hello all,

To give some background: I have a long distance from my AVR to my TV. First, I bought a 60' HDMI cable from BlueJeans cable. This worked fine for a year or so, then just stopped working one day. Everything was fine with an alternate HDMI cable, so I attribute that to something breaking in the Blue Jeans cable.

My next attempt was a HDBase-T monoprice extender. This worked fine for about 6 months, then it started randomly dropping the picture, but only for 1080p 24 content (oddly enough 1080p 60 was fine...) I verified that it only happened with my UTP cat6 solid cable (aout 50'). I attribute this to EMI issues and something wrong with the cable

So, I began to research STP cable. Then I learned that you really need a metal rj-45 shielded plug and a truly grounded socket on the extender. Unfortunately my monoprice extender is not grounded. Does anyone know of a truly grounded HDBase-T extender? I assume that means it will need to have a 3-pronged power cord too?

I would appreciate any help, I've wasted a lot of money and my wife is starting to lose patience, I'd like to get the right solution once and for all!

(ps, just had a crazy thought, maybe I could simply run a wire from the shielding on the cable to a pin in the ground on the wall outlet?)
Edited by trs79 - 9/29/12 at 10:37am

Thanks for the response, I checked Geffens site and it looks like they have a variety of shielded extenders.

If I were to get shielded wire for my current extender, could I simply connect the drain wire to ground to get the proper grounding? I'm assuming that is all the shielded rj-45 connectors are doing but I could be totally wrong. Thanks for the help

I see, that makes sense. Thanks for the information, I'm so glad I checked here before just buying shielded cable and thinking it would magically fix my problems. Looks like I'll just have to buy a new extender, although first I'm going to try re-terminating my current cat 6 cable just in case one of the ends oxidized or something

sorry for all the questions, but I just called Geffen tech support to ask about this extender: http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=9419 and he said they don't sell any grounded extenders, that the drain wire of the shielded cable drains only to the metal plug, not the unit itself. This sounds strange to me, but since I'm new at this could someone please clarify? My understanding was the rj-45 jack itself had to ground to its chassis or something, then the metal cable plug makes contact with the grounded rj-45 jack and grounds it that way.

Would the metal on the plug be enough to discharge the EMI?