New CATV cable

After having lived off Comcast's VERY old cable for eons (it has an unknown number of splices in the yard, reducing the signal strength once in the house), and now with the chimney gone, ethernet and coax cabling properly routed throughout the house, and ready to be terminated on the new patch/interconnect panel, it was time to call Comcast and have a technician come out and "pull some cable.

Should be fairly quick sicne I have a 1 and 1/4 inch conduit running in the yard, all the way from their pole, to my "connection" closet. Also left a pull string when I put in the conduit so it should be an easy task.

"Marcus" showed up on Friday afternoon, seemingly happy that I had prepared more or less everything. He did not have any cable lubricant, and knowing the size of the conduit, the few bends, neither of us though we needed it. While Marcus prepped the new coax, I crawled in under the new addition, ready to start pulling.

It is normally very nice and tempered under there, but this day, it was blistering hot, and not any better by a very stubborn coax. It likely took us 45 minutes to pull in that cable, a job that should have taken no more than 5 minutes with some cable grease applied. I pulled so hard I even got blisters on my right hand since that was the "prime" hand in pulling in the very tight space under the addition.

But, once in, and Marcus fed some ice cold coke and water, it was a qucik job for him to termiate the coaxes and connect them to their respective splitters.

The unsightly mess is now gone from the basement, and when we have a rainy day, I'm going to take 30 minutes and just dress the cables nicely. Everything looks much better, works much better (=error free) and it starts to resemble the 21st centutry.


One can see the traces of where things used to be...


At least it's a beginning - out of the way in a closet - with cables still to be dressed behind the panel