WHOO-HOO!
I'm in the home stretch now, baby!
Went under the new part of the house today, and ran the cables from our bedroom, through one of the old ventilation grilles in the old foundation, and brought them up through the holes I drilled in the closet floor.
I found some stuff under the new part of the house, but not Jimmy Hoffa, who's still missing.
I found a couple of hand-held garden cultivators, a hammer, and a really neat small pick axe/mattock with a 10" handle, just short enough to get a good swing in confined areas. The wife tells me they were probably left over from the plumbing work she had done a few years ago when they had to dig out a pipe and replace it.
I also found a full length of All Thread, which is now "All Rust".
I finished terminating the coaxial connectors, and swept the coax from 10MHz through 3GHz. All the sections have low loss, and the amount of "tilt" I'd expect for that frequency range.
Then I got out my Fluke Network Cable Tester and verified all the Ethernet cables.
We're good to go!
I'll cut over the Ethernet segment tonight so I can get rid of the three wireless Ethernet bridges I've been using, and tomorrow I'll connect all the splitters to the coax, and cut over the FiOS to the new RF segment. Before I do that, though, I'll go into the diagnostic menu of each of our set top boxes, and record the signal levels, and signal-to-noise ratio. I'm curious how much better the signals will be with all new, modern, low-loss coax.
After everything is connected and checked out I'll remove all the crummy old cabling that's hanging all over the outside of the house.
Been a pain, but I'm almost done.
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<i>The Fisher Saga</i> Continues - Act III -
Been working on this post since right after Thanksgiving. I'm making very good progress on the Fisher, and will most likely power it up...
Congratulations! You're just about there.
ReplyDeleteI have been in the crawlspace under the old house a number of times and it always made me claustrophobic. It sounds like you have a bit more than the 15 inch clearance (in places) that I had to deal with.
I think the only spots it got that tight was in the "pass through" areas under the load bearing walls. Those walls are anchored to parts of the foundation that extend in from the "box" that makes up the perimeter. They're mostly around the bathroom (makes sense!) and the floor furnace. It's like they knew somebody might have to get under the house someday, so to save you crawling a long path, they sawed out sections at a couple of places.
ReplyDeleteFor the most part, it's about 24"~27" from the dirt to the bottoms of the joists, plenty of room to roll over onto my back, and then back on to my stomach.
Going through the hatch in the wall to get under the newer part of the house was a bit of a chore, as the drain pipe for the kitchen sink blocks about 25% of the width, so I had to wiggle through past it. Once I was in, it didn't have the clearance that the older part of the house has, but was enough I could move around and get the cables strung.
Good News! Congrats!
ReplyDeleteGood for you, NOW for the hot shower... :-)
ReplyDeleteStill not finished, but it's a lot closer, and now I can take my time.
ReplyDeleteI'm mounting the splitters and network switch to a plastic cutting board I got at target today. They didn't have any of the $6~$8 white plastic ones like I usually buy (they stopped selling them at Lowe's and Home Depot!), so I had to buy a $20 "Made From 100% Recycled Plastic!" one, quite a difference in price.
Must be made by one of those "Green Jobs" companies Obummer is always talking about.
Wonder how much of my purchase price went to Acorn.....