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Moving the modem

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Since moving into my home, I’ve had my cable modem in our office. A room above our garage that has coax run to it from the garage, which is where the CATV coax enters the house. Coax enters the house through a wall, goes into a splitter, and heads from there up to our office. Total run length from the splitter is about 30ft. With the modem in the office, and then in the garage, the data for the modem follows (Update 5/26/11: After a couple days, the signal levels changed a bit in its new location. I’ve found online that 6 dBmV is actually a bit on the high side for signal strength, but within acceptable limits):

Office Garage Garage 2
Downstream Freq 567.00 mhz 567.00 mhz 579.00 mhz
Downstream Power 3 dBmV 4 dBmV 6 dBmV
Downstream SNR 36 dB 36 dB 35 dB
Modulation QAM256 QAM256 QAM256
Upstream Freq 32.400 mhz 32.400 mhz 22.800
Upstream Power 44 dBmV 43 dBmV 42 dBmV
Channel Type DOCSIS 2.0 (ATDMA) DOCSIS 2.0 (ATDMA) DOCSIS 2.0 (ATDMA)
Symbol Rate 5120 kSym/sec 5120 kSym/sec 5120 kSym/sec
Modulation QAM64 QAM64 QAM64

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Ground your cable TV coax!

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Ungrounded CATV coax connections can cause some rather bad speaker hum (at 60hz here in the US), and horizontal lines in your picture. Grounding your coax connection can help alleviate these problems, though it may not fully solve your issues. To demonstrate, here’s some backstory.

We have a older CRT TV in the garage that we use to play DDR/Stepmania, as well as have a TV going when working in the garage. I recently hooked an old computer up to the TV for a permanent Stepmania machine. Right after hooking this computer up, I started getting a really bad ground hum on the TV, which could be quickly fixed by installing a ground lift (Cheater Plug) on the computer power connection, but this is generally a bad idea (computers like being grounded). After doing some research, I found out that an ungrounded CATV connection can cause ground hum. Checking it out, I removed the CATV connection from the TV, and viola, the hum was gone. Okay… so, now to actually FIX the problem.

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Adventures in Home Electricity

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Yesterday, Tara and I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years (since we bought the house)… replace the old “round” electrical receptacles with newer “rectangular” ones. All and all, it was easy work, but somewhat stressful as we only had about an hour to do them all before the sun went down and made that part of the house too dark to work. In that time, we did about 15 receptacles, and 5 switches. 2 of those switches being 3-ways. And that’s where the fun began.

So, I removed the old 3-way switches, and made mental note of which wires went where. But, upon putting the new ones on, I couldn’t get them to work right. One of them would work correctly only if the other way turned on. If the other one was turned off, the first switch wouldn’t work at all. Now, this could have been an early sign that the first switch was bad (as it did stop working at all later that night), but at the time, I really couldn’t figure it out.

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