> About ten years ago I had a short on a new piece of cable toward the end of July, had a hell of a time tracking it down, went thru every connector and electronics on the run and still had a short. It turned out to be a 9mm slug that had hit the cable at an angle and spiraled down the inside of it for about 2 1/2'.
>
> > ...I was at a job that should have been a simple reconnect at a somewhat run-down motel/apartment building today -- a woman was having her service hooked up and having a cable modem and digital box installed.
> >
> > I called the dispatcher to get some help with getting the MDU box open; and then the fun started. We couldn't get any signal to the MDU box so the other techs and I went to the pole and one of the other techs found no signal at the tap and on further testing found out we had a bad line extender amp on the line.
> >
> > The other two techs started to look into the no-signal problem and noticed a hole in the side of the housing for the LE amp. The hole penetrated the housing and the amp itself -- and rendered the amp inoperative. It appears that someone had used a gun and shot the line extender -- and made a direct hit. We found bullet fragments in the amp itself -- and it had damaged some of the components on the circuit board, including a transformer.
> >
> > The owner of the building thinks someone ticked off at the cable company for cracking down on signal theft might have taken some target practice at the line extender. The building had had three incidents of cable theft recently.
> >
> > After the amp was replaced, things worked like a charm. But I wonder what sentence one would get for shooting and killing an innocent line extender. Any ideas?
> >
