Wet Cement

HELP!!

1/17/2000

I NEED SOME ADVICE: PLEASE HELP!! I ONCE HAD A CONTRACT AND MY BROTHERS WANTED ME TO HIRE THEM AND THEY NOT A BIT OF EXPERIENCE. BUT I DID NOT MIND HELPING THEM LEARN THE FIELD WELL NOT A MOMENT LATER THEY UP AND TOOK THE CONTRACT FROM ME AND LEFT ME IN THE COLD.HONESTLY THEY DONT HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE TO ACTUALY WORK IN THIS FIELD SO I DONT THINK THEY WILL LAST BUT ITS THE FACT THAT MY OWN BROTHERS DID THIS TO ME . WHAT DO I DO? PLEASE HELP. I DID EVERYTHING I COULD FOR THESE GUYS I BOUGHT ALL OF THERE EQUIPMENT\ AND DID NOT CHARGE A DIME. AND I PAID THEM FAIRLY WELL. SUCH AS APPROX.1K TO 1.5K A WEEK. NOT BAD FOR STARTING OUT. IF ANYONE CAN RELATE OR GIVE SOME ADVICE IT WOULD GREATLY BE APPRECIATED. THANKS SINCERELY, A BIG HEARTED PERSON.

dan maxwell

1/17/2000

hey jerry, what's going on. the islands i was talking about was puerto rico. loved it down there. no jerry i don't think i will ever stop contracting.Might be going to D.C to do some fiber. by the way. hook me up with some fiber for the month of july in Maine.sounds nice ehy?...drop me aline....

Buddy Dix

1/17/2000

To 'Help' First, drop the caps and get a grip. You should have seen it coming. Take what action you can to get your stuff back , but meanwhile do with what you have in order to maintain income. If all you have left is belt and hooks , then sign on with a crew and get busy. You will not be judged by your brothers, only by what and who YOU are. Plus, if they 'took' a contract from you then you were'nt on top of it anyway. Decide where you want to be on the food chain in 5-10 years and move on. Don't 'whine' or bitch about it, keep your mouth shut unless you are defending yourself and learn how to FOCUS, get in the game and pay attention. good luck

Joe McClary

1/18/2000

Buddy, You Da Man......

Mark A. Pickrell

1/18/2000

Hey everyone! Been gone for a while! Moving! Anyway, CHRIS, as far a reading your EOL with zero comp. That is the most acurate way of reading your EOL ACCEPT....you need to have a -10 tilt comp. and have your TP comp set in your meter at max. with a total of approx. 42 db TP comp. in order to get a correct sweep. SWEEP ON!!!!!

Kevin Duett

1/18/2000

Hello,I am looking for the band that played at the scta convention last may if anyone knows who was in charge of the ppc party.It would be extremely appreciated. Kevin Duett Global Broadband Plus

dan maxwell

1/18/2000

to buddy dix. regarding "help"... Who's to say he wasn't on top of it. do you have to moniter family that close!. Didn't sound like he was bitching to much to me. And you say keep your mouth shut unless your defending yourself. Are you for real!He comes to an open forum asking for advice,Sounds like the only mouthpiece I hear is you.As far as him focusing,I think he tried with fellow viewers until you shared your comments .I think that would drive anyone away.Then you wish him goodluck!Get real,And you!Get in the game.

SWeePTeK

1/19/2000

L.B., I agree with you when you say "give them what they want...". They are the customer and we do work for them...But as far as them (the MSO) knowing what they are doing just because they are multi-billion dollar company--I don't know about that. I would think that the company is mostly run by accountants and investors that take their word that they know what they are doing. My point being that we have all evolved with the changing technologies in the last few years--technologies including things as simple as wider bandwidths to things as complicated as dense wave division multiplexing and muxnodes. You would have to agree with me that the MSOs are learning along with us. And more times than not we are teaching them. Yes, us lowly technicians are teaching seasoned engineers. We teach them by our input to them. For instance---today I was optimizing a new area for sweep when a tech in the field called me and said that he was seeing a fluctuating area between 50 and 55.25 mHz. It was spiking 4-5dB at regular intervals. We had swept about 20 miles of plant off of the same headend and hadn't seen it there before. Keep in mind that we are working from an auxilary hub. So I brought the frequency up on the spectrum analyzer and saw that it was a set of sweep pulses about 1mHz wide and 2mHz apart. It happened to be that the Lead Tech for the MSO was there at the headend with me checking a digital carrier tiling problem so I had him look at the analyzer. He told me that they were indeed sweep pulses and were coming from a newly installed Calan Transmitter that they had added at the main headend for their seep techs. I asked him why he didn't tell me about it and he said that his engineers said that it would have no affect on anything that we were doing as far as sweep out of that headend. What they didn't know was that they were injecting their telemetry at higher levels than we were. I won't go into the solution because anyone familiar with sweep telemetry will be able to solve it simply. The moral to the story is that their engineers learned something today. I am a firm believer that we all need to communicate with our employers and visa versa. Broadband technology is advancing so quickly that we will never run ourselves out of work. Educate your MSO!!! If we are to advance, we need to advance together. Chris Moore...I can totally relate to your situation. We are sweeping C-Cor actives that are fed from Antec Gemini hybrid amps. We have been having a problem with getting the hybrid amps to achieve their 10dB tilt. We were fortunate enough to have an Antec engineer come out and talk to us about the problem. His solution was what we use to call gimmicks. There are coils on the detector cards of the hybrids. If the techs move these coils, spreading them or compressing them, they can change the response of the amps as far as changing the high end. This is the solution the Antec rep gave us for solving our problem!!! Of course some of our problems were in the fact that we are supposed to have a flat picture to the inputs of the hybrids, which hadn't happened very often. Usually we were seeing a reverse tilt of about 2-3dB which compounded our dilemma. We still don't have a "set-in-stone" solution. Chris, L.B., I wish you good fortune and I consider myself very fortunate to have people like you and L.B. and Mark Pickrell to exchange ideas, problems and complaints with, and a place like cabl.com to do it. :) SWeePTeKs Life lesson #10: If somebody orders a vinegar and water at the bar---they are probably a douchbag.

SWeePTeK

1/19/2000

P.S. (which in this case means Pre Script) Sorry about the tirade. Sometimes I just get on a roll. And no one has EVER called me a man of few words.

Mark A. Pickrell

1/19/2000

Accually SweepTek! I had no idea you had all that in ya MAN! The words I mean! LOL

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