Since so many Hams today depend upon their internet connection in the "shack" I thought this might be of interest.
A few weeks ago I started losing my internet service in the evenings. I have a Charter cable connection that had provided consistent >20 MBs downloads and >4 MBs upload speeds until then. Suddenly I was faced with evening download rates of 1 or 2 MBs and uploads of a couple of KBps - not enough to keep e-mail POP servers from timing out on short text messages! The next day everything was back to normal. I called Charter and they had a tech out to my place a couple of hours later. He showed me the spectrum plots of my internet signal over a number of days. Many evenings a huge surge of noise appeared that killed the S/N ratio. He explained that they've had to chase a number of these down in recent months. He said that it is often caused by a TV set with a direct internet connection for watching streaming programming. He explained that poor design causes some TVs to inject huge noise levels into the cable connection, apparently when the cable connection is not in use so the owner never notices it. They've had to track down a number of them in this area. He made some adjustments to increase my signal levels to help offset the effect of the high noise levels, and said they'd have a team searching all the node connections in the evenings to find the offender. It's something to consider if your operating is interrupted by poor internet service from a cable connection, especially during "prime time" hours. A slower connection may not be simply a heavily loaded system. Indeed, I've yet to notice any "system loading" my service. 73, Ron AC7AC ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
