My prior blog entries were all about converting my house's telephone lines for Ethernet use. Today I started to address my old home's coaxial cable tv cables. Cable TV was a huge thing from the 1980s until the 2000s, but it is a dying concept. Still, the one thing I've learned is that you need to understand something before taking out an axe.
Almost every room in my house has a cable TV outlet (some rooms have more than one). In my basement, a cluster of 9 cables appear in the telecom panel, with some connected to a giant splitter and some just hanging loose. Half the cable seems to have been run properly: inside the walls of the house. The other half was sloppily strung up on the outside of the house. It looks like most of this cable was installed 20 years ago.
So without further ado, I'm going to assess what I have.
Identifying and Testing each cable
My first order of business was to figure out where each cable was going to, as only one cable was labelled ("attic"). I bought an
inexpensive Cable TV tester to figure out to help me. Like my Ethernet cable tester, the Cable TV cable tester has two parts: the beeper end and the LED end. It uses an
A23 (or 23A) battery, which I never heard of before, but I see that replacement batteries are common and inexpensive.
So first thing first, I went to the basement and plugged the "big side" of the tester in. Plugging in the big side first would immediately reveal if there is a short in the line. Assuming no short, I'd run around the house and plug the "small end" of the tester into the jacks until the tester lit up. Then I'd run into the basement and use my label maker to mark the cable.
This process was very easy, but stupidly tedious. I can't think of a better way to do it.
In the end, I was able to identify all the cables. The only problem was the attic feed that serviced the 2nd floor.
The Attic Feed Failure
When I initially plugged the tester into the cable that traveled between the basement and attic, it showed as being shorted. Up into the attic I go.
In the attic I found that there was a splitter that was designed to take the attic feed and send the signals into various rooms. By temporarily removing the splitter, the "short" went away and the attic feed was shown to be good. Nice! There were also a three other cables in the attic that needed to be tested.
The good news is that one of the feeds to a bedroom tested good. I labelled it.
The bad news was that the other two attic cables were poorly terminated. After properly terminating them, they still didn't seem to go anywhere obvious. After some analysis, I figured it out: The improperly terminated cables were "corrected" by stringing additional cables along the outside facade of the house. Ug, so both ugly and wrong. Happily, I found the abandoned cables ends hidden inside their wall boxes, so now I had two working feeds to each of these rooms: one from the attic, and one from the outdoor facade.
Next steps
Next I'm going to remove all the cable TV wiring that's strung up on the outside of the house. It's all working, but it is ugly, fragile, redundant, and I'll likely never use it.
After that, I'm going to neaten up the cable TV wiring in the basement by doing some cable management using a splitter/amplifier.
