What kind of rf transformer will survive lightning damage? Have you ever wo rked in cable tv? I have. I maintained and repaired all of the elctronics. You are clueless. If it could be done, it would already be a standard. I no t only worked in catv, I designed and built headends including a mini heade nd that was in a large, pole mounted steel NEMA cabinet to interface a pair of community loops for a school district.
The utility company will fix it- it's just a pain to get them to come out and look at anything. Most of these open neutral problems are on the customer side too.
Most residential wiring in the US has two legs of 120volts coming in, over
3 wires. The center tap of the power company transformer is 0 volts (as measured to earth) and called neutral. The two hots are 240volts with respect to each other. If this neutral connection goes bad, the 240 volts across the hots on either side of the transformer will rebalance in proporion to the load. Side with lower impedance gets a lower voltage and the opposide side gets >120 volts and half your stuff burns out.Basically, in the US, you're not going to get electrocuted at home. The construction workers building it, yes, but past that 120volts max to earth it mostly harmless. There's been a mandate for GFCI and arc fault? circuit breakers to be installed in more and more places.
I'd not do it myself, but you'd probably be just fine laying on an electric blanket, on a waterbed and and stabbing through them with a knife in a place wired in the past 20 years.
One business I visit started to have lights go bright and dark, you could clearly see some get bright as others dimmed. That's a classic bad neutral connection issue. I told them what the problem was, but after hiring a handyman to bamboozle them into replacing light fixtures they finally called in a real electrician.
The wiring consisted of a split phase 240 panel -with the neutrals all running off a separate subpanel, coming in off separate conduits. No idea how that even happened in the first place, but it was some sort of deliberate effort by somebody in the past. The wiring was neatly done too, just wrong in every was possible. There was a bad connection somewhere in all of that.
Spectrum is here to install the new drop. They have worked an hour to drive it under my driveway. Their new direct burial coax has a bright orange jacket, to eliminate the yellow buried cable tape.
It took two and a half hours to bury. Then they told me that someone else would be out to connect it at the street. Isn't that great service?
A good example that private industry != good and efficient.
The problem is people, no matter where they are employed.
They are doing what is best for them. They have specialized crews and each one is scheduled when the previous crew is done. It may not be the quickest route to restoring service, but it is the most efficient use of resources.
-- Rick C. ++++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging ++++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Of course; no surprises there.
Whether or not it is efficient for /them/ is, of course, no consolation for /us/.
Hey Mike, I am very tempted to mention the Alan Dick 75-to-50 Ohm coaxial transmissio n line transformer for broadcast FM (which is basically a solid piece of co pper machined in two critical length sections). I'm reasonably sure it cou ld survive several strikes, but their track record for busted/leaky dehydra tors isn't so great. :)
Anyway, sorry to hear about all your troubles with the neutral / CATV. Hope you get it all resolved soon! For the record, I was never a fan of CATV repairmen / network engineers. In my experience, damn few of them even have the slightest clue...
Your point about CATV leaks: It goes both ways. (as I'm sure you know.) Now that T-Mobile is rolling out their 600 MHz networks, I suspect we'll se e a big uptick in reported CLI / uplink interference tickets. Of course, l eaks still occur daily in 700 MHz, and 800 Cellular. I once had a case do wn in Sunny Isles FL that was so bad (Atlantic Broadband), the FCC made the cable company re-string the entire neighborhood. (This was right on the c oast, and over the years the salt-air had pretty much corroded and destroye d everything. So many leaks, you couldn't tell where they were coming from !) Atlantic finally re-shuffled their modulators to keep off of the wirele ss bands, but that's getting more and more difficult these days.
They have to operate at a profit. They could work less efficiently and provide better service, but someone has to pay for it. Will that be you?
-- Rick C. ----- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging ----- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
They still haven't come back to connect my cable at the street. It will soon be a full month of no service.
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