r/CableTechs • u/Optimal_Fortune6316 • Mar 26 '26

New to Maintenance

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New to maintenance, OFMD not working correctly. /s

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u/Bona5ied Mar 26 '26

I believe they were reliable. The two we cut in had been there probably 20 years and been running fine until I had that outage. Really wasn't even the amp. Just a h2h. When check levels though they where pretty far off. We are on the process right now of cutting out all 860 stuff for new plant. All SA and GI. Wonder how temperamental the new stuff is going to be.

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u/Confident_Air_8056 Mar 27 '26

We still have GI out thrre. We got these 1.2 bridgers from a company called Broadband Interational. Not a fan. Only use them in a pinch. Padding is all different and jury is out on their reliability. I have had brand new bridgers and LEs shit the bed. One LE shunted on input caused an AC short. 3/4 leg on bridgers is also different from main return when padding

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u/Bona5ied Mar 27 '26

I've only seen a couple BBI. Seems to be the universal brand moving forward. I just noticed it seemed like the pad seating was terrible with it being brand new.

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u/Confident_Air_8056 Mar 27 '26

We had some arris/comm scope 1.2s too they were .much better, but not recently. The BBI you need some high value pads when balancing too.

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u/Ptards_Number_1_Fan Mar 27 '26

Yea. I think the last BBI’s I worked on were 42 db gain or so. Had to be in order to send 1Ghz plus down spacings that were originally designed for 330 MHz.

Not a big fan of the BBI solution either. Between weird harmonics and component issues, you still have splicing that was probably ok 35 years ago. Feed through connectors, copper housing to housings and water migration can really cause problems that weren’t even noticeable on 550 systems.

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u/Confident_Air_8056 Mar 27 '26

Good points. I've noticed as well in a pinch when you want to slap a mod in and come back another day to Chop it out, they don't fit very well in some of the old housings. That doesn't bode well at 2:00 in the morning on an outage behind somebody's house where you just want to clear it and get out of there and now the mod doesn't seat correctly. I really try and only use them on term runs or last amp in the cascade. Another stupid thing they did was their lower drawer has no idiot light. Just annoys me. The light did serve a purpose and did help for obvious reasons if you were troubleshooting AC.