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Had a crusty old cable guy in Tucson show me something I'll never forget
I was up on a ladder running a new drop for a retirement complex about six months ago when this guy, must have been 70 years old, walks up and just watches me for a minute. He was a retired installer from Comcast, told me he had done this route back in the 90s. He pointed at my coax and said "you're crimping that too tight, you're crushing the dielectric." I always thought a tight crimp meant a good connection, but he showed me how a slight looser fit actually kept the signal cleaner over longer runs. We sat there for ten minutes while he explained how he used to run lines for the old analog systems and how one bad crimp could kill a whole apartment building's picture. He even pulled out a rusty old compression tool from his truck that looked like it survived a fire and showed me the exact pressure to use. Has anyone else run into an old pro who gave you a tip that contradicted everything you learned in training?
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brian30315d ago
That one bad crimp killing a whole building's picture" is exactly why I started spending the extra money on good compression fittings instead of the cheap crimp ones. Seeing how much signal loss happens with a bad crimp totally changed how I do all my connections.
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wesley_hart15d ago
Watched a buddy try to save ten bucks on cheap fittings and ended up chasing a ghost signal issue for three days across a 20 unit complex. @brian303 nailed it though - once you've seen how much cleaner the signal path is with compression, you just can't go back to crimping stuff and hoping for the best. It's one of those things that seems like a luxury until you actually need to rely on it.
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