Fire! Fire! Fire!
Fun and exciting morning putting out the fires and desperately wishing my boss's thought process about technology was more sophisticated than 'but, you plug it in and it works, right?'
Some base knowledge:
We cablecast all of the city council meetings live. The signal comes from annother part of the building, basicly about a 100 meter run of cables from there to here. For years, we've sent the signal Y/C to help reduce interference, and because our headend routers use s-video connections. A couple of months back, we noticed that the signal had become pretty signifigantly degraded, along with some other technical issues in the controll room for the council chambers equipment. My engineer spent many hours working on identifying the problem and trying to correct it. But, no matter what he did, it was never as good as the boss 'remembered' it. So eventually we decided to encode the video to a DV stream and send it that way. We found an optical firewire repeater, and ran conduit and fiber lines for it. We had some problems as you would expect, both with rapidly adapting to a different system, as well as physical technical issues (like breaking the fiber optic cable while pulling it). Eventually we got it up and running, did some tests, and it was looking good.
Today was the first full-length meeting using the new cable. It began at 9 am, and the picture was very nice all day. Right up until about 12:30, that is, when suddenly the picture just dropped. Me and the engineer scrambled, and we got it back up. Then it dropped again. And again. We franticly ran through all the usual troubleshooting methods, but it kept dropping off. Finally we physically moved the repeaters and set them with cooling fans pointed at them. They weren;t more than a little warm, but it was one of the few things we could do. We had this in place by 1 pm, and the picture did not drop out again. We're going to do some extended testing tomorrow, but we're pretty sure that was the problem.
The trick, though, is getting my boss to understand that 1) we could not have reasonably anticipated the issue, 2) that the fiber optic system was indeed the best option, and most importantly that 3)shit happens with new technology, and you just roll with it.
I'm not holding my breath on those.
Some base knowledge:
We cablecast all of the city council meetings live. The signal comes from annother part of the building, basicly about a 100 meter run of cables from there to here. For years, we've sent the signal Y/C to help reduce interference, and because our headend routers use s-video connections. A couple of months back, we noticed that the signal had become pretty signifigantly degraded, along with some other technical issues in the controll room for the council chambers equipment. My engineer spent many hours working on identifying the problem and trying to correct it. But, no matter what he did, it was never as good as the boss 'remembered' it. So eventually we decided to encode the video to a DV stream and send it that way. We found an optical firewire repeater, and ran conduit and fiber lines for it. We had some problems as you would expect, both with rapidly adapting to a different system, as well as physical technical issues (like breaking the fiber optic cable while pulling it). Eventually we got it up and running, did some tests, and it was looking good.
Today was the first full-length meeting using the new cable. It began at 9 am, and the picture was very nice all day. Right up until about 12:30, that is, when suddenly the picture just dropped. Me and the engineer scrambled, and we got it back up. Then it dropped again. And again. We franticly ran through all the usual troubleshooting methods, but it kept dropping off. Finally we physically moved the repeaters and set them with cooling fans pointed at them. They weren;t more than a little warm, but it was one of the few things we could do. We had this in place by 1 pm, and the picture did not drop out again. We're going to do some extended testing tomorrow, but we're pretty sure that was the problem.
The trick, though, is getting my boss to understand that 1) we could not have reasonably anticipated the issue, 2) that the fiber optic system was indeed the best option, and most importantly that 3)shit happens with new technology, and you just roll with it.
I'm not holding my breath on those.