What you say here is true: "Almost no one gets OTA TV. "
But I did have a very odd experience with Xfinity when I was running FT-8 on 17 meters. Two guys came to the door and told me they were from Xfinity and were trying to troubleshoot a problem they were having with 18 mhz. I said, yes, I happen to be transmitting. Let me run it, and I'll bring my kx2 with no antenna down to see if it correlates with their display that was showing interference. I asked them how they found me and they noted that they looked up hams in the village, likely on the FCC site and I was the only one with antennas. (Admittedly only dipoles) Normally this is a not-fun story, but they knew it was their problem and wanted to track it down. It was kind of a reverse foxhunt for them--trying to find the point of ingress of the signal. Apparently that frequency is on one of their channels over the cable. They came back three or four times, solving one problem or another in their network. They finally fixed it. Or at least I think they did, as I haven't spent any time since then on FT8, and very little on that band. Usually these stories are full of accusations, but they up front admitted that it was their leak that led to service degradation in the neighborhood. And that is the only TVI (actually CATVI) since the 60s when TVs were pretty sensitive, and it was only in our house. w8lvn On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 6:38 AM Rob Atkinson via Topband < [email protected]> wrote: > >every piece of consumer equipment in your home and the homes of your > neighbors would be turning flips when you transmitted, > > That's not really as big of a problem now compared to 10 or 20 years > ago. Almost no one gets OTA TV. Most people are on cell phones, or > VOIP via shielded cable. People don't listen to music with stereos > and speakers now except for old farts like me. Most people use ear > buds and spotify. They watch TV streams over internet. Since almost > everything now is digital, fiber optic, bluetooth, wifi, you can run > QRO on medium wave and HF and not worry about a torch carrying mob at > your door. It's really a good time to be a ham as far as that's > concerned. > > 73 > > Rob > K5UJ > > _________________ > Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband > Reflector > -- --w8lvn-- _________________ Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband Reflector
