[RFI] ROAD RUNNER CABLE INTERNET SERVICE RFI

[Jim Brown]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 17:12:33 -0800 (PST), Commander John wrote:

>Anyone have experience with these cable internet nodes ?  

I have cable internet service from Comcast here in CA, and had it in 
Chicago from another vendor. It works fine here, and worked fine in 
Chicago -- most of the time. But I switched to a DSL service in 
Chicago because when the cable service did go down (and it did), 
their service response was lousy (like up to a week to fix it). 

As I understand it, nearly all RFI issues with cable systems is poor 
termination of cable shields and poor cables. It also pays to look 
at home first. I was hearing noise and a carrier around 2M repeaters 
in the 145 MHz range, which is used by cable systems for Cable 
Channel 18. The picture carrier is on 145.25, and there are close-in 
modulation sidebands from sync and for low frequency componenents of 
the video. I found that replacing one short cable hooking my cable 
system to a TV in my own home dropped the level of some of this 
trash significantly. I'm told that this is a common problem -- that 
is, short jumper cables installed by customers or left over from 
vintage installations. 

73,

Jim Brown K9YC