Friday FTA Fun Poll 8/22/08

[Mr Tony]

This one just came to me when working outside on the dish farm

Take a look at your FTA dish farm and answer this question.....

The cabling from the dish (es) to the receivers is.....

-almost perfect. Really neat and easy to track. Single dish setups probably look like this
-pretty good. Have multiple dishes and switches so it can get tricky but is easy to figure out what is where
-eh...its ok. Have multiple dishes & switches and it doesn't look the best but able to track a bad cable if need be.
-its a messy neat. You've got a lot of cables & switches and to the outsider it may look bad but you know where **almost** every wire runs
-yeesh...don't ask. When changing a cable or switch it takes you 5 times longer to find the right cable then it does to fix it

 

[Mr Tony]

messy neat. Outsiders might think it looks like hell but I know what switch is for what box and what cable goes to what switch

 

[Larry1]

I'm definitelly the
yeesh...don't ask
I know better, but don't do it. (something to do with always changing things up and not fully completeing one job.. just get it working)

 

[brentb636]

My cabling is pretty nasty outside the house, but I've kept it pretty neat inside. Everything is grounded where it enters the house, and is identified by colored tape
.

 

[USDownlink]

Messy neat. Outsiders stare in disbelief that congress still hasn't acted to prevent people like me from buying 500 ft spools of coax; But I can identify the exact segment between receiver/switch/LNB I'm looking at by the droop in the line where I've failed to secure it to the house.

 

[voomvoom]

I voted:
eh...its ok
and it really is, at least in the well house where the switches are located (at least most of them, some are at a dish)
but, don't even think about looking behind the Rack & TV. Talk about a mess (it's more like a Nightmare) and there ain't no switches back there (some splitters, but no switches) the cables are so tangled up, you would think it had to have been an Act of Congress to get them where they are today.......

 

[Pismire]

Well I went for messy neat. If you look behind the tv it looks fine to me but I know others would think differently. Cables run up in the attic and some under the house. One Channel Master I never did finish yet and it's been about 3 years now. I dug the hole and put the pole in with existing cement had it plumb with boards and haven't gotten around to filling the hole with cement. Anyway the coax on this one never did get buried and sits in the grass, it's a wonder the lawnmower didn't get it yet.

 

[techno935]

It's messy, all over the place.

 

[Keith Brannen]

Definitely messy neat. Fortunately, I have the cables labelled or I'd have a big problem, so changing/rearranging lines is fairly easy. Of course it does look like a huge black spider (more like a couple smashed together) where the many coax lines meet all the switches. But other than the fact that you might strangle yourself on a line or two that I haven't yet clipped to the ceiling of the basement, it's not too bad and moderately well organized!

 

[Pismire]

Fortunately, I have the cables labelled or I'd have a big problem, so changing/rearranging lines is fairly easy.

If you use different brands of coax then they are self-labeled. Just need to remember which brand goes where.

 

[Tron]

#2, pretty good...

I have two dual coax cables (total of four individual coax runs) coming into a window. They are neatly attached to the siding, and go through a four-port ground block as they leave the satellite farm. One of the cables carries OTA from the Square Shooter, the other three cables carry satellite.

 

[USDownlink]

Follow up:

How about some pictures?

I've included labels for your convenience.

First picture:
1. Cheap cable splitter. Emergency install - I accidentally took out my housemates TV.
2. Main cable splitter. While physically present before I arrived, the connections are all mine.
3. Expensive Philips diplexer. Not worth the money, but it works. It would however survive a nuclear explosion, unlike the:
4. Cheap Holland diplexer. Muxing the main cable signal. Works great.
5. Band stop filter for in house video distribution.
6. Regular cable splitter. Turns out the cable modem uses frequencies in my band stop. So I sent a line from the cable modem outside, bypassing the filter.

Second picture:
A. OTA antenna mast.
B. Three satellite-and-cable-unrelated pieces of coax. (There are three antennas on the mast).
C. Weatherproof switch enclosure. Basically a tupperware box with a piece cut out of the bottom. There is an 8x1 EMP and a 4x1 DMSI currently in there.
<> The rest of the picture is an 90cm Fortec with motor, and the requisite ladder, which almost never moves from that spot.

Third picture:
@: Ok, so I at least label my LNBs, and write down the current connections.
#: The careful observer will note my rendition of Harold caddata's Channelmaster brackets, which, while used rather recently, have fallen down the arms to the 031 currently mounted.
$: NPRM, NOAR.

 

[tvropro]

Voted pretty good I can trace cables, switches, splitters relativity easy. Wiring to house and into headend is very neat, it only gets a bit messy behind my rack.

 

[stogie5150]

Right in the middle. Outside, I keep it VERY neat. Inside, I cannot even tell what is what sometimes. I tried labelling it and tying it behind the TV, but all that did is make more work when I had to take something out of the stack.

 

[Mr Tony]

we're not talking about inside by the TV..my inside looks like hell

its from the dish to the switches (outside/inside etc)

 

[Dishpointer]

Mine are bundled together so it would be hard to identify a single cable that needs to be replaced but overall it's neat. Behind the TV and under the crawl space looks like hell though.

 

[Corrado]

I would have to say mine is "pretty good", it used to be "yeesh... don't ask"

I wasted so much time trying to figure out what went where and accidentally hot swapping things, I thought it was time to label and zip tie.

 

[schlever]

Decent, but no where near where it should be

 

[z4ccamaro]

#2 - Pretty Good - It's as neat as it's gonna get. Hey, at least I labeled the cables
How did I get this many cables ??? Oh, I kept adding dishes ......

 

[cjwct]

Near Perfect . . . I dare say Perfect becus the installer tucked and fastened the cable from the two satellites underneath the fence rail, ran it across bottom of back wall, over the hatch where he tucked it under the siding, behind the concrete steps, and then used the existing hole for the central air unit . . . he did screw up dish alignment . . . but this is about the cabling