Charles wrote:
My question: will this create any type of hazard? The cable tv
company wants to charge for a housecall just to come out and put a new
connector on the end of this cable. But I'm wondering if it's safe
enough just to stick the pin in and wrap some electrical tape around
it to hold it in place? Anyone know?

No hazard but if you want to do it right:
http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/fconn.htm


Granted, no hazard...in a similar situation, though, an improperly
terminated coax plug in my house caused a lot of ghosting on the rest of
the system. Once I properly dressed the cable, applied a connector (new
types require nothing more than a pair of wirecutters or even a knife to
install), the picture on the rest of the sets in the house cleared up
considerably.

What was happening was the strong over-the-air signal was leaking into
that unterminated connection. Where local channels corresponded to
cable channels, the result was a 'pre-echo' on the screen. IOW, there
was a ghost of the picture to the left of desired picture...messed with
the sound, as well. This is similar to multipath distortion when a TV
signal takes multiple routes on its way to an antenna. The different
paths results in multiple instances of the picture displayed, separated
by a distance determined by the time delay of each arriving at the set.

jak