Looking to build a scoreboard

[ARH]

I have been asked to look into a project along the following lines, but my school and college electronics is only helping me get so far...

I am looking to construct a sports scoreboard. I have found a decent source of large 7-segment displays and am quite happy making a simple control box (mostly based on logic gates) to allow chosen characters to be displayed.

The tricky part comes when considering whether the score board and the controller could be a distance apart - maybe as much as 150 metres. Ideally this would involve some sort of remote transmitter/receiver, but if necessry a connecting cable can be laid.

My question is 2-fold
1 - What is the simplest/easiest/cheapest method of communicating the input data to the scoreboard. Presumably some sort of serial link?
2 - Is this something a relative novice could undertake.

If anyone can offer any advice or recommend any reading that might help me to make some decisions and ultimately acheive my aim, I would be extremely grateful.
Many thanks
Andy

[Kevin Weddle]

You can run a cable as long as you want. A scoreboard is a simple undertaking. How much power did you want to display? Do you want to light bulbs? I think a start is to determine whether you want run the power to the display or power up the display from where it sits. You just modulate the carrier with a digital data using a phase locked loop. The input to the Vco is your serial digital data. The demodulation is also a phase locked loop which gives you the digital data in return. The output is the phase detector followed by the low pass filter. You sort of have to treat the digital data as analog in order to get a clear picture of what is taking place. The high data bits will shift the frequency up and the low will shift it down. The rate at which it shifts is the serial data rate. For demodulation, you will see exactly the opposite. The signal is input to the phase detector. There is no oscillator input. The output is the low pass filter.