Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Mark Allread wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Mark Allread wrote:
And there you have it. I work with cabling in a TV station, requiring no
more than a dozen pieces done at any given time, and you work with small
wiring inside a chassis on an assembly line, doing hundreds. Each
function has its own equipment needs.
But a butane lighter - especially the "jet" types that behave like tiny
brazing torches - will flame downward well enough, unless they're built
to draw fuel only while upright.
I removed the "Hot air" tip from a butane soldering iron once, and found
it even faster than the lighter, but it required more care in use. If
one tipped it the wrong way, the flame would flare due to it drawing
liquid instead of gas butane.
I used a lot of clear heatshrink to label cables for TV stations and
CATV headends. I preferred to label it before it was inside a rack,
whenever possible.
Indeed - whenever possible. That's how I put in the replacement
Production switcher, after all.
When the cable is to be run through the length of the building, through
tight support brackets already crammed with cable, it is sometimes best
to run one cable at a time and then label each when finished. Heh, time
for a little walk down memory lane...
Ah, the weeks I spent pulling obsolete cable out of that installation,
trying to make room for new cable... Whoever had worked there before me
had left quite a lot of work undocumented... There are few greater sins.
Try a military Radio& TV station (AFRTS) where nothing was
documented. After 20& years of equipment being moved around or replaced,
it was a nightmare. I had the master monitor fail one night, but
couldn't disconnect it, because the main transmitter was at the end of
that loop. They had a nice set of Grass Valley video DAs, but only used
one of the four outputs on each. Add to that, some video connectors
were BNC, and others were PL-259 since the station was built during the
time manufacturers used both.
I got fed up with intermittent cables, so one Saturday I ran a
temporary cable from the film chain strait to the transmitter and
started pulling out dead cables. The 12" * 18" cable tray was full when
I started. When I finished, the bundle was under 6" and several
thousand feet of dead cable were laying in the corner of the transmitter
& control room. That master monitor had seven pieces of coax between it
and the video switcher. There was over 100 abandoned cables I pulled
out. Most had one bad connector, and some had both bad. The other
engineer walked in and almost fainted, but I had everything in place in
time for or noon newscast, and finished everything else before my 20
hour shift ended.
They had the audio board fail in the TV control room at one time, so
they extended all the lines to the radio station's audio console and
used the preview output to feed the TV transmitter. When they got the
board back from the AFRTS service depot, they left the extra wire
connected. You could see radio station's the AM modulation in the video
baseband, from the ground loop that mess caused.
My Chief Engineer cracked up when I mentioned that "there is something
fundamentally wrong with any job that requires knee pads and a
squeeze-bottle of (cable) lube."
Just be glad it was run above the ceiling, under a metal roof. It
was rarely comfortable up there, It was either below zero, or in the 90+
degree range.
Still, by the time I was finished, the digital stuff was in and the
analog stuff (at least that which we no longer needed) was out. I even
built a set of shelves in the basement to hold the obsolete analog
equipment we hadn't sold or scrapped yet, and I carried the stuff down
and filled those shelves.
Digital? We were B&W, and the only ICs were RTL.
(Resistor-Transistor-Logic) ;-)
It was an interesting two years at that station, and then they laid off
more than half the staff, myself included. Ah, such is life.
Those cables were installed well, labeled well, and documented well.
And a lot of equipment that wasn't working, was, by the time I was done.
I built a mobile production van for WACX in the late '80s. I used
about 50 feet of clear heat shrink. 
And now I'm a college student on the Dislocated Worker plan.
I imagine I'm in good company here.
Not me. The VA has decided that I'll never work again, and it drives
me crazy.
That all sounds kinda familiar, somehow...
And yeah, those PL-259 video connectors kept unscrewing themselves.
First place to look, for a bad ground connection, especially if somebody
had screwed a BNC adapter onto it. I've been in this line of work for
about 30 years, so I've seen a few of those. Sometimes you'd see
adapters on adapters. I called that a "Stack-o-dapters".
Well, this thread is getting a little long and off-topic. I'll sign off
here.