The cable gods hate me.
Our cable and internet has never been all that great in our house. It'd work fine, mostly, except you'd occasionally lose your internet connection; or observe that the picture quality would show some tearing. While annoying, it was never frequent enough to actually do anything about.
And then it got worse.
Before I continue, I should mention that Mandy & I are totally hoooked on So You Think You Can Dance. It's a guilty pleasure, and we don't talk about it all that much. (For instance, while this season's tour is starting in Tacoma, I haven't quite decided if I'm willing to admit to my habit in public... ;-) In my defence, there really wasn't that much HD content available when we first got the new TV.
For the last month, each week's episodes have looked worse and worse. Finally, they were impossible to watch. Continuous tearing, stuttering in the audio. And it'd get worse during the prime time evening hours. Sometimes a show would start off fine, and then gradually degrade as the evening went on.
Mandy was not at all happy.
As a man-geek, I knew what my job was. I had to fix it. Some co-workers suggested that my signal quality may be too low which somewhat intuitively just made sense. Even the DVR diagnostics on the Tivo agreed. Probably, the cable company was futzing around with "stuff" and messing up my TV, right? The bastards.
So off I went to Amazon (you're welcome, Dan) to buy myself a cable amplifier. For 40 bucks or so I had myself a state of the art 20 db adjustable signal amplifier. It was all heavy and metal. I thought it was pretty nifty, even if I didn't exactly know quite what it all meant.
Naturally it didn't work. As soon as I turned the amplifier on, my TV picture went away. Huh.
So I did what any good man-geek would then do: I called the cable guy...
...who naturally showed up this morning when everything appeared to be working perfectly. But still managed to figure things out. (Really, he had the issue diagnosed after _one_ reading.)
Apparently, the signal was too high.
Yeah, I know -- the amplifier was probably a bit of a hint. (Really, I'm not all that bright.) And the variation during peak hours? TCP/IP degradation of an underlying switched digital signal, suggests I? Not at all says he -- it's just thermal fluctuations. You see, resistance across a wire is higher when it's warm. So as the evening temperature dropped, the signal strength would go up, hence causing me to swear at my TV more.
The clincher came when he took a look in the smartbox where the input was optimized through one of those professional looking 2-way splitter thingies and bypassed that flimsy looking plastic 6-way splitter that was installed with the house. (Which makese all the sense in the world to me. Got a signal problem? Remove all the extra components which may be causing interference.) Naturally, wiring the cable through the suspciously big splitter provided the exact 5db signal attenuation necessary to bring the amplification back into balance.
Clearly, I just don't get analog.
And then it got worse.
Before I continue, I should mention that Mandy & I are totally hoooked on So You Think You Can Dance. It's a guilty pleasure, and we don't talk about it all that much. (For instance, while this season's tour is starting in Tacoma, I haven't quite decided if I'm willing to admit to my habit in public... ;-) In my defence, there really wasn't that much HD content available when we first got the new TV.
For the last month, each week's episodes have looked worse and worse. Finally, they were impossible to watch. Continuous tearing, stuttering in the audio. And it'd get worse during the prime time evening hours. Sometimes a show would start off fine, and then gradually degrade as the evening went on.
Mandy was not at all happy.
As a man-geek, I knew what my job was. I had to fix it. Some co-workers suggested that my signal quality may be too low which somewhat intuitively just made sense. Even the DVR diagnostics on the Tivo agreed. Probably, the cable company was futzing around with "stuff" and messing up my TV, right? The bastards.
So off I went to Amazon (you're welcome, Dan) to buy myself a cable amplifier. For 40 bucks or so I had myself a state of the art 20 db adjustable signal amplifier. It was all heavy and metal. I thought it was pretty nifty, even if I didn't exactly know quite what it all meant.
Naturally it didn't work. As soon as I turned the amplifier on, my TV picture went away. Huh.
So I did what any good man-geek would then do: I called the cable guy...
...who naturally showed up this morning when everything appeared to be working perfectly. But still managed to figure things out. (Really, he had the issue diagnosed after _one_ reading.)
Apparently, the signal was too high.
Yeah, I know -- the amplifier was probably a bit of a hint. (Really, I'm not all that bright.) And the variation during peak hours? TCP/IP degradation of an underlying switched digital signal, suggests I? Not at all says he -- it's just thermal fluctuations. You see, resistance across a wire is higher when it's warm. So as the evening temperature dropped, the signal strength would go up, hence causing me to swear at my TV more.
The clincher came when he took a look in the smartbox where the input was optimized through one of those professional looking 2-way splitter thingies and bypassed that flimsy looking plastic 6-way splitter that was installed with the house. (Which makese all the sense in the world to me. Got a signal problem? Remove all the extra components which may be causing interference.) Naturally, wiring the cable through the suspciously big splitter provided the exact 5db signal attenuation necessary to bring the amplification back into balance.
Clearly, I just don't get analog.