Tune In – Antennas are the Eyes and Ears of Signal Leakage Systems Despite huge improvements in computing power available to design tools and simulations, RF antenna design remains at least somewhat of a black art. The best antenna designers are often brilliant Engineers, but most will admit that past experience and quite frankly luck […]
Why Signal Leakage, Why Now? Ingress has been the single largest thorn in the side of cable operators since the advent of CATV plants, only to be aggravated by the introduction of two-way services. Despite decades of innovation, the silver bullet solution to fully address this problem remains elusive. Why Ingress Is Such a Challenge: […]
The HFC Evolves Through the years, with the demand for additional speed and bandwidth cable systems have: Migrated from analog channels to 6 MHz SC QAM channels Migrated from modulation schemes from 16 QAM up to 256 QAM channels Migrated to DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM carriers consuming much larger areas of the spectrum Began migrating from […]
The Early Days of CLI Leakage The new regulations required the operator to monitor, measure with a specific technique, and log all system leakage. The operators soon realized that this was a difficult task with their current equipment, as signal level meters had insufficient sensitivity to measure 20 uV/m at even 10ft, much less be […]
Signal Leakage in Cable Networks, a Long and Winding Road Cable is a unique communications medium that has evolved from a rudimentary patchwork of transmission lines and components devised by an industrious group of technology pioneers decades ago into the leading broadband juggernaut that it is today. The remnants of this journey are still evident […]
Fiber Deployment is on the rise (no shock there). How do you transfer need-it-now, real experience to a new (and inexperienced) fiber tech? There are any number of things that you can point to to demonstrate what is driving growth in fiber deployment including regional FTTH/PON initiatives, national high-speed broadband growth, core 100/200G upgrades, or […]
Simplifying high-density fiber cable certification The rise in fiber adoption by service providers is great for those who manufacture the cables, but it’s causing a headache for many who have to commission it. More and more, higher fiber-count cables are being laid, leading to a challenge for installers and contractors: how to manage, track and […]
The growth of MPO adoption in the past few years is changing the game for network architectures around the world. In a previous blog, 5 Things to Know Before Working with Multi-Fiber MPO Connectors, I referenced some trends and growth projections for MPO connectivity from a recent survey by VIAVI Solutions that polled hundreds of […]
Con Houlihan, the great Irish sports writer from my hometown of Castleisland, once replied to a young poet who had shared his writing, “Keep going. You’re making all the right mistakes.” As a young boy, the words did not fully resonate with me, but now—a bit older and hopefully wiser—I can see the wisdom therein […]
This is the fifth post in a series on Smart Fiber and OTDR Testing – see links to previous posts below. OTDR Test Analysis Gets Smarter (and Easier) It’s a common belief that OTDR testing and analysis are difficult. In the past, OTDRs could be complex to configure and measurement results were often hard to […]
