I think my city's TV company is screwed

[mstechca]

I can't believe it. There have been a number of occurences where a TV station on my TV becomes slightly corrupted, maybe because of me, and maybe not.

But, today and yesterday were the worst. (I didn't have any other electrical items that could possibly interfere with the TV turned on.) Yesterday, the entire set of stations I normally get (channels 2 through 60 something) went from crystal clear to white noise for 20 minutes consecutively.

Today just got worse. I put on the morning news at 8:00 and all of the sudden, the TV goes to whitenoise again as of 8:50am. It is now 9:20am and the whitenoise did not disappear.

I bet it is the cable company doing something.

Has anyone else been experiencing this?

I'm in Hamilton Ontario (60km away from Toronto).

 

[mstechca]

It just went back on.

 

[audioguru]

Cable TV isn't perfect since the cable is stressed by the seasons and by corrosion of its many connections.
Everyone knows that the underground cable is broken every time someone on the street gets their driveway re-paved.
Place a service call with your cable-TV company and they will show you your bad connection at your TV, and probably charge you for the service call. :lol:

 

[williB]

Most likely its the sun interfering with the satellite of your cable company..
it will probably stop today or tommorrow..

 

[audioguru]

Hey, it's springtime in Canada. The mice and squirrels are mating in the cable box outside. They'll be done soon! :lol:

 

[zachtheterrible]

remember that movie "whitenoise"?

maybe your house is haunted :lol:

 

[Someone Electro]

That reminds me of that rat that got in to an old tube radio.The rat chewd trugh some cables and got fryed in the end. (tube radios work at high voltages)

 

[core]

A couple times a week, my cable goes out at very odd times of the morning, like at 4am. I know the lazy cable company isn't out there doing upgrades -- they like to save those for during primetime so they can inconvenience as many customers as possible.

Strange thing is, when it goes out and comes back on, it does so in exactly the same manner as if you were unscrewing it manually. My vote is I have some neighbors that are too cheap to pay for cable, and don't know the right way to steal it without temporarily disconnecting the hardline for everyone else! 4am seems like the perfect time for such activity, no? Less folks awake to witness you trying to shimmy up a 30 foot pole after having a few drinks at the pub that night.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

We used to run two small cable systems at work, one at Bakewell, VHF 405 and radio only, and one at Matlock, which also had 625 line TV, down converted to VHF from UHF (channels A, D, and H - I can still remember!). Both systems were really old, and all valve!, very unreliable, and if there was a power cut it took about two days to get it settled down again!.

Anyway, moral of the story! - we had reports of the Bakewell one giving poor pictures on a certain section - so we went out to have a look. Some guy had illegally connected himself, but rather than connecting to the tapped off output, he'd connected directly to the main high level line.

He admitted what he had done (couldn't really deny it!) and signed up for the service, so we connected him properly - however, the TV needed the front end valves replacing - either they were duff before, or the excessively high input had damaged them.

To be honest, I call them unreliable, but most problems were caused by power cuts, or by people cutting the cables - I really learned to hate JCB drivers :lol: The one at Bakewell was particularly troublesome, because the cables were underground (installed as the estate was being built) - unfortunately the hillside it was built on was subsiding (sliding down to the river!), and this was stretching and snapping the cables.

The main lines came out of the ground on each house, into a tapoff box, and back down into the ground again - the tapoff boxes were fitted about three feet off the ground, screwed to the wall. We went out once for a large failure, went to check on the tapoff box - and it wasn't there!, the subsidence had ripped it off the wall, and we dug down to find it four feet underground!.

We were really pleased when local TV relay transmitters eventually opened, and we ripped the systems out with great glee :lol: