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The Move: Fighting Coax

It is unfortunate, but even the pre-move things don't seem to be going as well as expected, and it has impacted even my online games.  I had hoped to be hosting games at either the new or old house, but the new house has an evil secret.

Deep in the bowels of the new house, which supposedly has cable internet hooked up now, is a nest of around 40 coax cables running to everywhere.  It turns out the house was wired for dual satellite plus cable, meaning many of the rooms have three coax drops.  There are also phone and DSL drops.  That is a lot of cable.

In the beginning it seemed simple, in that the cable TV drops were unfinished, and I could just hook them up and voila... internet.  But no -- one of the previous occupants decided to "fix" this and now there is a mangled mes of unlabeled cables that may or may not hold the key to getting cable hooked up.  It is nice that they are mostly housed behind the panels of the drop ceiling in the basement, but still, it is impossible to trace them down, especially when I can't even see where the CATV comes in, and I have no tools for testing which cable is live, since it requires special CATV boxes and modems, which I know are notorious for not quickly connecting.  I tried my TV, but it says no signal on everything, which I'm not sure I really believe.  What I wouldn't give for an RF power meter that would work with the CATV signal?

Anyway, I broke down and a contractor is coming out to trace the cables and get the basics up and running.  At the cost of a contractor, I just want the bare minimum up and running -- 3 drops.  In addition, I purchased Klein Tools Cable Tester than has the ability to test and trace up to 4 endpoints, in the hopes that future links can be reconfigured after I have gone through the tedious task of labeling all of the non-active drops.

Meanwhile my box of cable TV and internet hardware is doing a nice job of holding up a TV hooked to an antenna, and my box of networking cables and routers is acting as a nice side table.  The good news is that years of playing Pathfinder and other RPGs has prepared me well for having my plans and schemes destroyed and for rewriting them on the fly.  I just hope that we can get the games going again before the holidays take their toll and drag everyone off to other things.

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