Last Tuesday we had to go on a tech ride-along at work. For those of you who don’t know, I work as a telephone customer service representative for Comcast Cable Co. And I thought this was something very interesting that I learned that nobody else will find interesting. But if you have cable in your house go ahead and look behind your TV for a white cord going from your cable box to your wall (or from your TV to your wall, or it could go through a VCR or DVD Player, etc)… Anyhow this is called a coaxial cable and it usually looks something like this:

Anyhow, most of the techs have 600+ feet of this white cable in their truck at all times and they have some useful tools to make these. I learned how to make these cords at any length during my tech ride-along. I also got to see the tech troubleshoot in some beautiful homes along the beach, but I found this much more interesting! Maybe it’s because I got to make the cords. Here’s the tools used to make these:

 So first you take your wire cutters and cut a length of the coaxial cable. Next you have to use the specialized stripper for your RG6 cable to strip away the outer sheath from the cable and the metal inner sheath a little bit higher than that. And above that you’ll want only the copper wire showing through. RG6 is just a size of coax wire. It’s the most commonly used for cable indoors.

So after you have both ends of your cable you need to fold back the metal part so only the white is showing. Next push an F-Connector over the wire so that the inside is flush with the white part on the cable. Next slide the F-Connector on the cable into the connector compressor (if that’s what it’s actually called) and cramp it all together and repeat on the other side of the cable.

Now you have your customized coax cable! No, I don’t expect anyone to actually do this, I just felt that I hadn’t written in here for far too long.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.