On Friday, Phillip (a.k.a. freelance outside cable technician extraordinaire, who also owns a bucket truck) had a productive day in Bentley, replacing about 800 feet of aerial feeder on Ragan Street. The Ragan Street Feeder (a.k.a. the “A” Feeder) serves everybody southwest of Midland Street. In that 800-foot section, the cable had already been repaired twice (before my time) with little patch-sections being inserted, which means a total of 4 couplings [cable – (1) – patch – (2) – cable – (3) – patch – (4) – cable] and the repair jobs had not held up very well… especially with this wind.
My policy on repairs to feeder cable from here, on out, is very straightforward: We don’t repair feeder cables. We replace the bad section.
I once saw a sign that asks a poignant question:
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
I know, right? Good stuff. How many times have you said to yourself, “I’ll just ‘temporary’ this and fix it later?” Not good.
Sometimes my progress is slower than I wish it was. Sometimes, it’s because I’m trying to do it right the first time.
Stated another way:
Good, Cheap, and Quick – pick any two.
If it’s good and cheap, it won’t be quick.
If it’s good and quick, it won’t be cheap.
If it’s cheap and quick, it won’t be good.
I stopped by Bentley on my way up on Friday, then spent Friday night and Saturday in Marquette, until a migraine took me out of commission.
I started out the morning looking through the channels at a couple of rough spots. Channel 41, the KWCH Storm Team 12 Weather station, has been looking and sounding terrible. I had walked Ron through some attempted adjustments on the phone, but adjustments weren’t the fix – that modulator had to be replaced. Done. I didn’t have a new Channel 41 unit, but I did have an “agile processor” which can be used to transmogrify one channel into another, so I shoehorned it in there and the quality is much-improved, though not as much as a proper modulator would probably provide, so I’ll add that to my list.
Channel 96, JCTV, was very fuzzy. Testing revealed another bad modulator needing replacement. Also done. In this case, I did have the exact piece I needed and JCTV looks and sounds quite amazing. If you haven’t looked at it lately, it’s definitely worth a second look.
Channel 24 (or is it 25? I’m sleepy) HGTV has a “squiggly thing” going on, which also appears to be a… wait for it! Yes, another defective modulator. I’ll add that to my list.
Then Ron and I went out to look at a feeder cable on 3rd Street that has another of those infamous repair/patch jobs. I figured that’s what we’d be looking at, so I brought a couple of hundred feet of replacement feeder cable and that is on his short list of things to do. This should clear up some intermittent Internet issues east of Washington Street.
The wind has really done a number on the cable plant. We sawed off a fallen pole today and then went looking for cable damage.
We recently acquired a very handy piece of diagnostic technology that allows us to locate breaks in the cable line. When I say “breaks,” I don’t mean, “Oh, look, a broken cable,” No, I’m referring to partial breaks – which are much worse that complete breaks. If the line is laying on the ground, just about anybody could drive up and say, “yep, I found your problem, here, yer cable’s broken.” Partial/intermittent breaks are much more elusive, since they still “work,” but they cause reception and/or Internet problems.
So we went out in search of them. All I can say is, “ask and you shall receive.” We found one spot where the wind has flexed the aerial feeder cable to the breaking point, two more that “don’t look good,” and a 4th one with no visible damage, but damaged nonetheless. Things like this can really cause some annoyingly intermittent problems, which get worse when it gets windy, as a result of the weakened cable being flexed over and over. I have 2,000 more feet of feeder cable on order and Ron will jump to it on these issues as soon as they arrive.
We went over to the new (northwest) part of Marquette, and did some preliminary design work to extend the cable system to all of the residents of that part of town. After the repairs I talked about above, guess what Ron will be doing next?
Still no progress with Turner, but I think the coming week has a bit of potential to get the process off high-center and get those stations back on the cable. Progress report will be posted when available.
Sunday afternoon, the headache finally relented to the point that I was able to get out of bed, so I headed to Bentley.
Bentley has a pleasant surprise coming. I dropped a big ‘ol chunk of change and purchased a new Fox News satellite decoder last week. I was planning to install it in Bentley on Sunday, and I did… knowing that it wouldn’t work right out of the box, because I have to wait for the Fox News business office people to do the documentation required to “authorize” the descrambler (i.e. make it work).
Unfortunately, I discovered that Fox News’s digital feed is now on a satellite called Galaxy 17, at 91° W, in the orbital slot formerly occupied by Galaxy 11. And there are no other channels that I’m carrying from Galaxy 17… although I do have a dish pointed at it. Try as I might, I was unable to lock onto the Fox News signal, so that left me with two unknowns – either the receiver I just got is no good, or there’s trouble with the alignment or the electronics mounted on the dish. (Incidentally, the receiver will lock onto the signal and tell you what signal it is, even if it’s not authorized – you have to lock it on before they can send the authorization codes to it – they’re sent over the satellite.) I’m showing strong signal, but the “AFC” (automatic frequency control) indicator shows wild fluctuations – too wild for AFC to lock.
Good troubleshooting calls for eliminating the unknowns, so I took the receiver to another cable system where I have some contacts, and dropped it off Sunday night, so they can hook it to their G-17 dish and see what gives. Meanwhile, I submitted the necessary information to Fox News so they can authorize it. As soon as it’s working, I’ll make a road trip to Bentley. I’ve already re-activated Cable Channel 24 (complete with a “no signal available” screen), so everything is ready once the equipment is good to go.
If you remember from before, when KSAS-TV (Fox 24) was on Cable Channel 24 (prior to it moving to Cable Channel 7), there was something not right about 24 on cable – it had squiggly lines on it, just like 24 in Marquette, which is a totally different station.
Testing revealed that the modulator was in fact not defective this time. When I took the 24 signal off of the cable and connected it straight to a TV, the picture was great. So I reconnected it, and then began going through the other modulators, shutting them off a few at a time until I found one group of 8, which, when disconnected, caused the interference on 24 to go away. Looking at which 8 channels were involved, I contemplated with of them would be most likely to interfere with channel 24. The winner? Channel 13. Because of the way cable channels are numbered, 13 is actually only one channel – 6 MHz – away from 24. (It goes 12, 13, 23, 24… some time I’ll go into the detail of this, which will also answer the question of why the cable system skips from 46 to 95).
As luck would have it, I had a filter in my toolbag that blocks channels 24 through 39. I have no idea just why I had this filter, but I had it. (I don’t generally throw things away if there’s the remotest possibility of using them in the future.) I screwed it onto the back of the Channel 13 unit, and voila – trouble cleared. Apparently, it’s reasonably common for modulators to “splatter” signal outside of the desired range, and perhaps especially so in the case of “agile” modulators, like the one being used on Channel 13. Many modulators are made for one specific channel. They’re called “fixed,” in contrast to “agile” modulators, which can be set to whatever channel you need, depending on the design of the modulator. On a fixed modulator, the manufacturer can attach a bandpass filter to only permit the desired signal range to leave the chassis – if there’s any splatter, it won’t make it to the outside. Apparently, the agile one doesn’t have that.
Incidentally… a “modulator” is the device that takes the decoded video signal I receive from either satellite (cable networks) or antenna (local stations)… or locally-generated video, in the case of Public Access Channel 2, and wraps it inside a carrier signal on the desired channel. For example, the Channel 2 modulator encapsulates the video in a carrier at 55.25 MHz, and the audio in a carrier at 59.75 MHz. All televisions know that this is the frequency we commonly call “Channel 2,” so when you set your television to “Channel 2,” the TV knows what frequency to tune in and display.
On the topic of satellites, how strange is this: the satellites used to relay cable programming are in geosynchronous orbit – orbiting the earth at the same speed the earth rotates. Well, sort of. Technically, they’re higher up, so they’re actually traveling much faster, but from the ground, they appear to be stationary. They’re 22,300 miles up, and over the equator. This altitude is necessary because of Kepler’s third law, which in simple terms dictates that if you’re further away (example, the Moon, 235,000 miles away, requiring 27 days to orbit the earth) you take longer than a day orbit, and if you’re closer (example, the International Space Station, at a paltry 190 nautical miles up, orbits 15.7 times per day) you spend less than a whole day in orbit.
As for the communications satellites, each “bird” occupies an orbital slot on a particular line of longitude. But here’s what’s strange: They name the individual satellites, not the orbital slot (i.e., position in the sky). So, for example, at 135° W, all of my equipment says “Satcom C-4.” But the satellite is now “AMC 10” – they replaced the actual “Satcom C-4” spacecraft (satellite) with a different one, “AMC 10” and instead of sticking with the same name, they change the name that the same orbital slot is represented by — so now, you have to have access to that legacy information in order to make sense out of the current information. To me, that’s about as sensible as changing the name of “Air Force One” when the physical aircraft is different… which, of course, they don’t do.
Tinkering with the Fox News hardware took several hours, so I didn’t get anything else accomplished on the channel lineup changes in Bentley. I’m still looking forward to getting that done – I think it will be nice to have the channels all arranged in a sensible order.
I’ve had some trouble with the new TBN (Channel 98) satellite receiver in Bentley – it’s locked up on me twice now, and had to be rebooted. It’s plugged into the battery backup system, so I don’t think it’s a power-related problem, but I don’t really know what else the problem could be, at this point. I’m going to continue to watch it, and if it continues to misbehave, I may swap it with the Smile of a Child receiver and see if the trouble follows the receiver, or the satellite signal. (These two receivers are the same).
I also will be bringing JCTV to Bentley. The first satellite receiver Trinity sent me was defective – doesn’t even power on. They’ve ordered another one for me. The current plan is to place JCTV on Channel 97. Additionally, I’m working to bring in C-SPAN 2.
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