Tag: wiring

March 18, 2025 – Resistance Is Futile

March 18, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I am working on a project that seems to be ever going. That is my network infrastructure. Probably for the past ten years, I have had plans to expand full network capability to the apartment. Various tenants have paid for their own service over the years but ultimately, I want to prepare it for an Air B&B or office or guest house. I don’t want to pay two bills for internet.

I have a box on the outside of the house that I planned to run conduit. I still might but we will get to that later. Back when I had a tenant that had a real phone, the phone company would only run service to my house. It was my responsibility to get the service over to the apartment. I quickly sprang into action and ran a Cat5e cable to the apartment on a cable that had had been run between the two buildings for that purpose.

After the tenant moved out and we started residing the house (2015), the phone line was no longer in use and the hardware was in the way. I cut the line telling myself that I would implement a better solution. I have done all of the easy work but the time never came where I wanted to rent a trencher and dig up the yard. I haven’t given up on the idea though.

The good news is that when I cut the line, I still had the whole cable length. I was going to use that cable to install the wireless bridge. Most of the work was fairly easy, terminating the ends and hanging the units. You never know what you are going to find in the wall though. I wrestled and wrestled with getting the fish tape through the wall to my new jack location.

Sunday evening, I was beat. I could not fish the wire through the wall. You might ask why I couldn’t just re-terminate the phone line? Good question, I cheated the first time and ran the wire on the outside of the house and drilled a hole in the siding. When I redid the house in 2020, I pulled all of that into the attic space because I resided that house as well.

My only option was to cut the wall to get access. I really did not want to do it because it adds a week to the project for additional repair work of the drywall. But, at some point there is a tipping point. After spending two hours trying to fish the wire and only getting halfway through, I had no idea how this was really built.

Once I resigned myself to the extra work, I was done in about two hours. By done I mean I cut the hole, fished the wire, terminated, tested and hole filled again. The work of patching the drywall is only fifteen minutes a day for a week. Initial mud and tape, second coat, texture, prime and paint. My real concern is that the work is disruptive having to move furniture everyday and clean up as I wasn’t there.

I will write one more time about the wireless bridge when I am actually done with the project. It definitely seems temperamental, but that is for a later date. There is still cleanup work to be done in terms of tidying up and optimization. I continue to work on that while I am doing the wall repairs.

End Your Programming Routine: The trick is knowing the right time to change strategies. I don’t regret attempting to fish the wall before cutting. Maybe I should have given up sooner, but then again maybe I was just another attempt from succeeding. All I can really say is that sunk cost fallacy can cause you to give up or double down on a failing path. Be flexible and be willing to change course if things are not going the right way.

December 12, 2024 – Crimes of Opportunity

December 12, 2024 /

Sometimes I have things that I want to do but don’t have the desire to put in all the work to do it. What I mean is that I bought a splitter and some extra cable so that I could split the signal from my AM antenna on the roof. I am thinking of adding an additional input to my scanner.

Right now, the scanner is in my office but in the future I am setting up a radio area elsewhere in the basement. I think the attached antenna to the unit works ok most of the time but given that I am in a basement, I cant help but think that there is an impact on reception. I have found that weather (or something) is giving me significant feedback at times.

I have two places to split the signal. One is outside somewhere along the house and the other is in my office. The best place to split it would be at the source but who wants to get out a ladder and make another penetration in the wall? But there is another devil out there, the penetration into my office is buried behind all of the Christmas decorations. Given all I had going on this summer, I bought the stuff but I didn’t have the desire.

Since I had to drag all the Christmas stuff out last weekend, I thought that would be the perfect time to get access and string the wire I bought over the summer. Like all things, it turned out that the process didn’t go as smoothly or quickly as I hoped. I had to drill another hole and use fish tape and monkey and fiddle around. But I got it.

The point I want to make is, being prepared and taking the opportunity saved me the work of moving all of the bins out of the way. This is not an insignificant task. It was two hours of hauling stuff upstairs last Saturday. Granted, the first time I did this, I just moved everything out of the way in the basement. But, it is still effort and it takes a lot of Tetris to get everything back in its place. I usually have to make several attempts each year as things trickle back in after the season.

The same logic goes when we were re-siding the house. I wanted to add some more energy efficient windows in my wife’s office so I ordered them as soon as the job was starting. I wanted to upgrade the skylight in the upstairs bathroom when the roof was replaced. The best time to do the job is when it is in progress so it can be flashed properly.

Our ancestors were opportunists. Yes, sometimes they set out to hunt because they were hungry. But, it is better to take advantage of a situation when they came across it. As long as they had the capability to process and preserve or hold their fortunes. I think that we have lost some of this recognition with places like always stocked grocery stores or widely open home centers. We don’t recognize opportunity when it occurs.

End Your Programming Routine: I know that our culture values constantly work. I am just as guilty of that myself. But, I don’t think our ancestors thought that way. We have shifted from doing just enough to ‘just do it’. In this case, I don’t think it is a big deal but it is that mindset training that is valuable. Unfortunately, if we don’t practice looking for opportunity then we will think about it after the fact. Then we are stuck in the ‘just do it’ mode.

September 6, 2023 – 3, 2, 1… ???

September 6, 2023 /

There is a subplot that happens in the movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Clark spends a ton of time unwinding, testing and hanging Christmas lights. He calls everyone together and makes the final connection and nothing happens. Then he checks and rechecks everything with the same result. Finally, he gets so mad that he runs around and kicks the reindeer setup on the ground.

That pretty much describes my AM antenna experience (without the audience). This has been going on a long time with a lot of effort put out by me over time. I have tried to research this topic, I have built prototypes that didn’t work. I tried to extend the existing loop antenna outside, all to no avail.

It was about a year ago that I got up on the roof to install the antenna I purchased online. I after fishing the cable through the wall, I tested it. While not what I would like, it got the stations that I was looking for and it was much better than the loop antenna that came with the radio or the other solutions I tried.

The last piece of my stereo installation in my office was to get the AM antenna wire to the receiver. Of course to do that, I needed to move all of the Christmas decorations out of the corner to get proper access. Second to that, my basement is such a mess since my son moved out for our exchange student this summer. Stuff is piled anywhere there is space, I really had no where to move stuff. Somehow, I managed precariously pile up all the bins and boxes and retain a small isle for travel.

Reorganizing is something I do every fall. With this being a wet basement, I almost always spend time tidying up before it is too late. I am just as guilty at not putting things away properly in the summertime knowing that I will eventually pay the price in the fall. But, it does feel like the basement is where things go to die and I deal with the bodies.

I tied, fished and stapled the cable to my office without tripping or breaking something. The antenna is marketed for radio, (like ham) so it has a rather unique connector that looks like a miniature coax connector. If I was hooking it up to a radio, than easy peasy. But no, I had to devise a way to convert from coax to bare wire which I eventually found a device that I could modify to do that job.

I plugged it into my receiver and nothing. This was the moment that I almost started breaking stuff. I turned off the lights knowing that the fluorescent ballasts interfere with AM signal, no improvement. I sat back in my chair and thought, well I can stream anything that I want anyway. I guess that was a lot of work for no good reason other than I wanted it to work.

As I sat back in my chair, I thought how could this have gone wrong? This was the whole point of testing this setup before I moved it. I did add an extension to the original cable, was this a bridge too far? I started thinking about the connection. I put red into the signal and black into the ground. At least in electrical wiring, black is the neutral. But maybe it was the other way around, this is low voltage. Low and behold, I got signal.

End Your Programming Routine: This is finally complete, it feels good. I do regret that I have a hole in the wall with wire sticking through but I don’t know about these small radio connections. I don’t have the tools to terminate nor if any wall plates exist. It is hidden behind the couch anyway. The point remains that it is installed and complete with the results that I was looking for. Now on to the hundreds of other things I want to get done, like tidying up the basement.