Cable TV 'Leakage' How much is too much?

[kc8hnz]

After getting the shack set up in the new house, I noticed i can pick up the analog cable tv transmissions over the air. From my research I've found its unwanted transmision from a fauly coax somewhere in the cable providers system and a small degree is allowen by the FCC. But I'm receiving it at a s-3 on just about every audio freq in the 'cable band' if you will. Anyone else every experiance this and if so how did you resolve it? Were you able to resolve it?

 

[n5ims]

First step is to call your cable TV company and report it to them. Most try to keep things pretty tight since if stuff leaks out, it also will leak in and cause unhappy customers. Often the leaks are due to folks hooking up their own "free" connection so they're happy to shut them down quickly. The other main cause is issues such as squirrls chewing on cables or other maintenance issues that need to be fixed prior to customers calling in about bad signal quality.

 

[eaf1956]

Free Cable

Call and say THANKS for the FREE cable and they will be sure to come fix it.

 

[mikepdx]

First step is to call your cable TV company and report it to them.

With all due respect, the first step is to make sure YOUR OWN house is in order.

Be certain all F-Connectors from the splitter or ground block to each and every
TV, Cable modem and Cable Converter are snug.

Be certain all the coax cables within your home are 100% cable company supplied
or meet their spec for shielding.

Very common causes of leakage is poorly shielded coax jumpers
that come with consumer products, non-cable company supplied splitters,
and poorly crimped or twist-on F-Connectors.

Another common cause is just plain cheaply made TV tuner packs within TV's.
Cheap Chinese junk to be blunt.

If you live on a postage stamp lot in the city or an apartment,
it could also be from similar issues with a neighbor.

You can easily find the source by using a 2m handheld as a cable leakage sniffer.

Good luck!

Ex-cable TV employee here (and a ham).
About 90% of leakage problems are in the residence.
Granted, there is that 10% leakage found in the company plant too...

 

[benbenrf]

After getting the shack set up in the new house, I noticed i can pick up the analog cable tv transmissions over the air. From my research I've found its unwanted transmision from a fauly coax somewhere in the cable providers system and a small degree is allowen by the FCC. But I'm receiving it at a s-3 on just about every audio freq in the 'cable band' if you will. Anyone else every experiance this and if so how did you resolve it? Were you able to resolve it?

So this is analouge cable interference as opposed to digital interference - correct?

This could land up taking up a lot of your time........
You are just picking up the audio bandwidths - and it is the actual frequency, not a harmonic?
On which band (or bands) i.e. low/mid/high/super/hyper ...?
What happens if you tune your receiver/scanner to around 2.75Mhz below the freqeuncy/ies on which you are receiving audio interference - is there any kind of interfrence that now bleeds through?

 

[kc8hnz]

Yes, its the actully audio freqs for analog channels that are coming in at a solid s-3 on my icom R-7100 through a discone on top of the house. There is a lot of 'noise' all over the entire spectrum, but especially below 30 mhz which I'm thinnking might be digital cable leaking out as well, but I can't be sure. I took the handheld and used a stubby whip and followed the cable line in from the utility pole to the house hook up box and in along the lines to each tv and can't pin point the source, so I don't think its coming from my house.

What concerns me the most is if I'm hearing so much noise below 30 mhz with just a simple whip on the handheld, whats it gonna sound like when I get a dipole up and gt my HF station setup.

 

[derevs]

Cable leakage

Here is hint given to me several years ago when I had a leakage problem within my house.
In my area the government checks for cable leakage via over-flights and then reports to the local cable companies.

The tech that came to the house was very nice about it and since I was a scanner enthusiast let me try to cure the cable leakage problem myself. I had my own electronic splitter and cables around the house.

If you have a portable scanner with air frequencies, tune it to 121.500, turn off the squelch and walk around listening for increases in the static. If it becomes to strong remove the antenna.

I located my leak to a cable going upstairs. Disconnected that cable, and no noise in that vicinity.
Replaced the cable and checked, no longer any leakage. Called the tech back and he no leakage showed on his meter. Everybody was happy.

The other thing to check for on your cable is un-terminated connectors, They can also cause leakage. You can buy terminators at most electronics stores (RS).

 

[zz0468]

Years ago, I had a UHF repeater with a 2 meter remote base on it. We used the remote on 147.45 simplex a lot, because a few of the guys didn't have UHF radios. Well, that frequency happened to fall within the video channel for the local cable system's HBO channel. So, driving around town we would get all sorts of noise on .45

A call to the engineering department would get a response, but it might be a week or two before they got there. Or, we discovered, we could park under the cable with the leak, and talk on .45 with our 110 watt Motorola Micors and get INTO the cable system and put cross hatching on all the tv receivers downstream from the leak. Response time became minutes, not weeks.

Of course, it didn't hurt that we were using the cable system's head end site for the remote base, so we knew just what buttons to push. But it was interesting to note that the leak went both ways.

 

[kc8hnz]

Well after doing a walk around the neighborhood with the portable I believe I identified the source of the leak about three blocks away. Called the cable company and they are sending a tech out tommrow. We'll see what happens.