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Showerthought: one bad coax staple in a Kansas City attic ate 4 hours of my day
Last Tuesday I was finishing a 3 room install in Kansas City and the signal kept dropping on just the bedroom box. I checked the splitter twice, swapped the modem, and even ran a new line through the crawlspace before I found it. One staple on the original run had nicked the copper just enough to short out when the attic got hot. Four hours for a fix that took 30 seconds once I saw it. How do you all track down a partial short without ripping out the whole run?
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patricia_gonzalez29d ago
A single staple in a Kansas City attic costing you 4 hours is the most coax thing I have ever heard. Those little copper nicks love to hide until the attic hits about 110 degrees and then they short out just to mess with you. A TDR meter is the move here, it shoots a pulse down the line and tells you how many feet away the fault is, so you can cut open the drywall right at that spot instead of guessing. Beats crawling through a crawlspace twice, that is for sure.
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