The Sanitary OEM Refractometer is designed to be connected to a network with a standard Ethernet cable. The cable supplied with the instrument has an industrial M12 connector in the instrument and a RJ-45 connector in the other end. The maximum communication speed of the refractometer is 100 Mbit/s (Ethernet 100BASE-T). In the simplest form the network consists of one refractometer and one computer. The following figure shows the configuration.
Several refractometers can be connected to the same Ethernet network. The Sanitary OEM Refractometer also has an automatic function (known as Auto MDI/MDIX) to detect the polarity of the network so that the network may utilize either cross-over or straight interconnecting cables.
The following figure shows an example of how to connect three refractometers to an existing LAN with a switch.
It is possible to use a WLAN access point to decrease the number of cables.
The maximum distance of a single Ethernet connection is 100 m (incl. one joint adapter/coupler), but if longer distances are required, a fiber link may be used to extend the range as shown in the followinf figure. The range may be up to several kilometers with a suitable fiber connection.
