In article ,
John Ferrell wrote:
On Fri, 6 Apr 2007 08:21:15 -0600, "Ed Nielsen"
wrote:

Twist-in connectors do not provide the shielding that a CATV system needs.
They are a HUGE source of ingress/egress, and the return loss is rather low
(the higher the better. Hex-crimp fittings have ~18dB, and compression are
30dB). Plus, It actually takes more time to put on a twist-on connector
that it does to put on a real connector.

Compression fittings may cost a little more for the connector and the
installation tools, but cost less in labor (time) to install. Not to
mention the materials/time spent in replacing the twist-on connectors with
real ones when they don't work properly.

A couple of years ago the house took a lightning strike that I deduced
damaged cabling provided by the cable system(Time-Warner). I removed
my additions and placed a service call. When the truck arrived I
showed them where I had dropped my stuff off the system and restored
their original configuration. After they fixed the connector arc-overs
they ran there signal leakage test. Then they requested I restore my
alterations and one by one they chased down ALL of the twist-on and
crimp connections that I had made and replaced them with their own
compression fittings. The results were better picture quality, zero RF
influence from the Ham Xmtr, and higher speed Internet.

I think I better invest in the connectors and tool to keep things
tidy.


The 40-floor internal CATV system I was a customer of was very close
to, and LOS with the Empire State Building antennas. The cabling
engineers described the CATV system as one big antenna. Problems that
poped up tended to be a bad connector or a grounding problem. It wasa
data lan so if there was a problem we couldn't just tell theuser to
watch the ghosts until we got around to fixing it.





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