Propagation delay in PCB traces

I've seen worse, where some idiot hack sawed through the jacket of a .750" hardline in a CATV system and connected his TV to the severed cable. It was about + 20 dBM, and had 60 VAC at 30 A from a CVT. He knocked out CATV service for hundreds of homes, and set the TV's tuner on fire. It was obvious who did the damage, yet he tried to claim it was that way when he bought the house four years earlier, and the system was only three years old. Then the idiot tried to sue the cable company for the damage to his TV. He lost that case in small claims court, as well as the one in criminal court for theft of service. He had to pay all the repair costs, the court costs for both hearings, then was blacklisted as a potential customer. So much for 'Saving a few bucks' and 'Sticking it to the man!'. ;-)

Lucky for him, the system wasn't using mid band channels, or he would have shut down the airport, and had the FAA on his ass.

I like this photo from that page.

Nice! Good to hear that sanity prevailed in the court case...

(I can just imagine it now, "Your honor, nowhere on the hardline does it say

---Joel

I'll bet that he would have tried to sue for damages if he fell off the utility pole, only to discover that _very_ few poles are owned by CATV companies. ;-)

We had a building contractor near Cincinnati, who intentionally dug up our underground trunkline where it passed the driveway of a new home several times. The first two were repaired, no charge. The third time he claimed that it was another 'accident', then tried to stop our crew from doing any repairs. They had to call the police out, and he tried to tell the police it was an accident, and that he was within his rights to refuse access because the cement truck was due. One of the cops asked our crew, How far down is the cable? 40 to 48 inches below the paved road. And how deep is the grade for the concrete. 6 inches. Then he turned to the contractor and told him that we were in a county owned right of way, and he was responsible for all the repair costs. He had to pay for a cement truck full of ready mix he couldn't use, because it would have set up in the truck before the work repair was done.

He was sent a bill after the repairs, and stormed into our office screaming that it would be a cold day in hell when he paid $1200 for "a piece of telephone wire" and left. When the house was ready for the new owner, he discovered there was a lein on the property, so the title couldn't be transfered until it was paid. He had to go to the county corthouse and spend most of a day to find out who had filed the lein. He only had three days left before the construction loan had to be paid back, in full, to his bank, so he was furious as he stormed int the office when we opened the next morning. The manager was a smart ass and asked, Whay didn't you pay theis three months ago? Well, let me call our corporate offices and see if I can do anything to help you. He pretended to make the call in his office, then came back out. You're in luck. I can accept the late payment this time and have the lein lifted this afternoon, but corporate policy is that any repair bill that is more than a week late has to be processed by our corporate lawyers, and their backlog is over six months, and you've just usedyour only exemption.

He was so ignorant that he went to the township trustee meeting to complain, and demand they revoke our franchise. One of the Trustees smiled and said, It would be easier on us to revoke your business license, than have everyone upset with us. The franchise stipulates that the current cable system must be wrecked out to leave it ready for a new system. then we have to put out requests for new bids. On the other hand, we can cancel your contractor's license, right now, if you intend to keep up your silly little war. We've had several calls from your subcontractors who reported that you said, "No one needs cable TV and I'm going to put them out of business" and were destroying their property, on purpose.

Guess who never came close to another buried CATV cable? ;-)

A "fat blob" seems to imply a wider trace, which would make an impedance change and cause reflections and other losses...