Forum Discussion
Warning, don't fry your modem.
Some years ago, an EMT vehicle backed over and destroyed my Hughes dish. The next morning I called my trusty tech company, and the first thing he asked me was if the coax was damaged, and next if h...
Yes, there is DC power supplied by the modem going through the coax to power the radio on the dish. Under certain situations the modem can be damaged if the power is shorted out. There are protections built in but they don't always work.
Also one reason we say to power down the modem from the wall receptacle, not the plug on the back of the modem.
Interesting.
I worked in a phosphate plant in central Florida ( Which has more lightning than any place in the US ) that was built mostly on reclaimed land from a salt water bay.
The plant had been in operation since 1915, and the combination the salt water, and years of acid spills, turned the whole place into a giant battery. I used to joke that if you bolted a 4/0 welding cable to a beam at GTSP and then ran it to #4 CAP ( about 3/4 mile away ), you could probably weld with the ground loop current. BTW the place was well grounded. I was amazed to see the number of ground rods that were put in when they built a new plant.
When we put in our first Distributed Control System, it was connected with coax as double token ring. We called it the broken ring. All of the coax had to be quickly replaced with fiber optics, which added another layer of hardware that could fail, since a FO to coax converter had to be added to each DCS site. It was still a broken ring, it just wasn't broken as bad.
We all breathed a sigh of relief when the DCS company finally supported ethernet.
Boy, writing this has brought back a lot of old memories, although I worked there for 31 years it's all been 16 years ago.
"If men were the automatons that behaviorists claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called “behaviorist psychology.” So they are wrong from scratch--as clever and as wrong as phlogiston chemists."
Lazarus Long
Fiber and 1000Gb is definitely the way of the future. RF will always have its place, but I would rather see a company like this use quadrax or even pure silver twinax and start utilizing some aerospace tech instead of staying with the antiquated tech they still stick to because it has worked for so long.
I understand the inherent costs, but if you can provide speeds faster than the competitors simply by using different cabling...dudes, why aren't you doing it?
