On Oct 25, 9:33*am, aemeijers wrote:
Mikepier wrote:
The Comcast tech found that we were losing 45 db from where the cable
entered the house to the office where the phone sat (+25 to -20).
Even with an amplifier on the line and him replacing all the ends, we
only got to -10.

He blamed the rg59; a neighbor who's an EE figured it had to be the
horseshoe nails once I got in some of the crawlspaces and found them.
My neighbor figured the horseshoe nails were messing up the shielding.

You sure you don't have a splitter, or a lot of splitters somewhere in
the mix? 45db is a heck of a drop.
Anyway, your best bet might be to forget about trying to use the old
cable as a drag, and maybe go from the outside, or perhaps in the
attic to run the cable to the location.

Attic, maybe. Outside, no. Ugly and leads to early failures. There has
to be some usable way to fish a new wire in the walls. Around here,
Comcast and the others always try to cheap out and do it the quick and
dirty way. I'm surprised OP got their tech to spend any time diagnosing
it. Most of the techs are subs, and they want to get in and out fast,
since they don't make that much per site visit.

I always tell people to pre-wire it themselves, or hire somebody, before
their scheduled hookup date. I've had to rewire several cable and satt
installations for relatives, where the 'free' installation was worth
about what they paid for it.

I'd pay those guys not to run wires. In one house I worked on the guy
ran from the electric meter up into the gutter, inside the gutter
around back, around the wing, up the side of the building and poked a
hole into a back bedroom. Almost 200' of cable and the basement was
open, there was a wire chase from front to back, and the house was
balloon framed so you could pull the wire up 1-2-3. Maybe he was
killing time at the end of the day, or fell off the ladder a couple
times too many. I was trying to figure out how many times the damn
idiot moved his ladder.

R