I don’t often talk about my work here on Cruft. While I find professional television and computer technology a fascinating career, many are more interested in my adventures in my kitchen instead.
Here’s a little tidbit to show you how my somewhat irreverant style surfaces in my professional life.
One of the trade magazines I read is TV Technology, a fairly good source for news and opinions. My favorite column is by The Masked Engineer, a TV engineer that hides behind a psuedonym while he/she writes about the FCC, industry players, and other TV trends in a humorous way.
In a column last year, The Masked Engineer wrote about cabling in facility. His/her viewpoint was so far out of whack with reality that I was forced to reply. I sent in my rebuttal soon after and was suprised to find it in the current issue.
(Loyal Cruft readers might recognize the use of photos and humor to make my points)
Of course, the Masked Engineer and Belden are full of crap in their idea that reasonable tie-wraps can hurt the signal quality. Belden is the same company that once advocated running SDI video over Cat 5 cable. If anything would be bad for signal quality it woud be running CCIR 601 over unshielded cable designed for ethernet.
We’ve had a fully SDI plant for ten years now, with tie wraps, and without any troubles with cabling. By far our biggest signal troubles are with RS-232/422 cabling long lengths and patchbay jack failure, neither of which have anything to do with tie wraps.
Perhaps we’ll have an Indiana Jones style showdown at NAB…
You are both FOOLS. EVERYONE knows that tie wraps at periodic intervals in HD-SDI narrowbands stunts the patchbay unshielded CCIR 601 manifold exhaust valve! What are you guys thinking? What you need to do is re-sync the 232-422 with a T1200 gigaflop compiler and let the XPL-902 take it from there.
Um… Yeah… See, the thing is, we really HAVE had tons of problems with the tie wraps. It’s just that you’ve been so busy with meetings that we didn’t want to bother you with it.
Does the problem from tie wraps come from tightening them down with herculean strength and pinching the cables?
I hope with your slavish devotion to regularly-spaced tie wraps you have not forgotten to frequently de-mux the bit bucket on the framistan. Otherwise, there will be hell to pay come Judgement Day.
And as a non-coworker, let me just say how glad I am that you seldom blog about work.
Arrrgh! Tie Wraps is the debbil! Well, not really, but my opinions are skewed because I work with the most tie wrap crazy people you have ever met. I was trying to do some work in the server room and I got pissed off and banned tie wraps from my equipment forever. There were cables tie wrapped to other cables, which were tie wrapped to whatever was closest. The screw holes on the rack, the grills on the back of a computer or router. Man I wanted to poke someone in the eye!
Sounds like you need some lacing bars.
Two words – Lacing Twine
Digibeta deck!
I can’t tell you how much it tickles me to see people get into a fight over tie wraps degrading system peformance. It just makes me smile. I have NO idea why.
I really want you to kick this Masked Engineer’s guy’s butt. Here is a suggestion. Suck some measuring tool company (or better yet a TIE WRAP maker or cable manufacture) into the story.
Get them to do an IRON Engineer measuring test.
One with tie wraps one with out. Test, measure and produce the results. It’s got drama AND science AND technology and you can send sexy HD video over the cables just to add something for everyone.
The publication’s audience will EAT IT UP!
Or maybe that’s just me. I love shoot outs and comparison reviews.
Carry on.
I like spocko’s idea, just don’t do a ‘naked engineer’ version. The contestants will take that as a literal command.
Lacing cable is gettin’ pretty old skool.
Velcro straps are the new black tape.