My first OC hanging out with my good friend @legatnightstar.bsky.social! Big thanks to @jezebelremedy.bsky.social for making this gorgeous art and an extra big thanks to @legatnightstar.bsky.social for gifting this to me!

I made it! If you see me say hi!

Aaaannnddd it’s snowing now.

First shift working overnight on North Texas upgrade, it’s already below freezing.

Haven’t had shotgun damage in years. What’s funny is out of all the pellets that hit the cable only 1 broke through the shield causing a short leaving 200ish customers without services.

This ended up being an all-nighter to fix. Only because the power company took most of the night to replace the pole. Apparently it was a drunk driver who ended up being ok.

Posting the only #MLP art I made for Luna Day. I drew this for #LunaDay 2020 so here are some different versions I came up with as I was finalizing the sketch. I'm in no way an artist so I don't know the proper terms. Also, this is a redraw of a piece Yakovlev did that I really liked, link below.

This one isn’t as interesting as the previous outage. This outage looks like old chainsaw damage to the feeder cable. In this case corrosion over time eventually caused AC power and upstream traffic to stop passing through the damage. What’s funny is this happened sometime ago with obvious no issues

The pic of the computer is from the upstream spectrum analyzer for the node. This particular issue wasn’t strictly an AC short but also an RF short bridged by the AC path. When that bridge happens we get a RF distortion which repeats every 6.4MHz. This distortion interrupts modem traffic severely.

Had a couple of fun outages over the past week. This one was due to old BB or pellet damage to feeder cable. In all my 11 years I’ve never seen what I’m assuming is water vapor from the heat created by an AC short.

After swapping out the power supply BER values decreased down to nothing and also MER (modulation to Error Rate) also increased, which is good. Last time I found one of these issues it was so severe it was causing an actual outage.

More cable issues! While not an outage, this issue was affecting an apartment building with roughly 30 subscribers. In your typical cable plant there are numerous signal amplifiers used to help distribute RF to subs. Here we have a bad power supply to a line extender (LE)

I busted out my measuring wheel and measured out the footage I got from the TDR. At the 167’ mark I can see the cable looks damaged under the black PVC jacket. Getting out my ladder and climbing up on the span I cut off the jacket revealing completely broken outer and center conductors.

First entry into what I will deem as the “Outage Diaries”. So for the past 3 nights I had about 6 customers lose service around 10pm and come back on around 7am. Normally it wouldn’t be an issue to find at night, but this particular area has no utility access ways for overnight access…

Since I’m going to try and actually use this site I guess I’ll post about stuff I do for work. You know, given that it’s where I spent the majority of my time for the last 11 years. Here is some pics of a fiber splice enclosure I built and spliced in training a few weeks ago.

New addition to my hat, GO VOTE!