Old lady in Henderson taught me a trick about coax cable bends

I was hooking up her cable last Tuesday. She came out and showed me how she used to work for the phone company. Said I was bending the cable too tight around the corner of her house. She showed me a loop method that keeps signal clean. Anybody else get advice from customers that turned out to be right?

3 comments

3 Comments

hugos469h ago

Bending the cable too tight around the corner" - that old gal knew her stuff. Those sharp 90s kill signal for sure.

west.casey7h ago

You ever have a buddy who swears by something crazy until it saves his butt? My friend Dave was rewiring his attic last year and kept getting pixelated TV in his bedroom. Old guy next door wandered over, watched him for a minute, then showed him this exact loop trick with the coaxial. Three loops, loose as a garden hose, and suddenly the picture was crystal clear. Dave still talks about it like the guy was a wizard. Hard to argue with results like that.

riverh493h ago

That reminds me of something I read in some old ham radio forum years back. They were talking about "velocity factor" and how a coax cable can actually act like a filter if you give it enough slack in specific ways. I guess the loops create a kind of matching transformer or something, which cleans up the signal reflections that cause those pixelation and ghosting issues. It sounds like total voodoo until you see it work, then you realize the old timers figured out physics tricks we forgot about. My grandpa used to coil up extra antenna wire in a figure eight and swore it pulled in a station from two states over. Makes you wonder how many of these "old wives tales" are actually just lost engineering knowledge.