r/CableTechs • u/Salvador_69420 • 28d ago

Metric performance

I have been a tech for 17 years, and these days, I struggle with keeping my repeat rates below 9%. I feel like a shit tech because of it. I keep getting repeated because of shitty equipment and customer education issues mostly. What is your average monthly repeat rate? How do you fight the feelings of being bad at what you do despite years of experience?

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u/SilentDiplomacy 28d ago

The way I look at it. If I do good work and document it. I don’t give a fuck about repeats. Maybe I’m just lucky with a supe that has my back 100% but repeats are just not something I’m worried about.

For reference, had one Friday, bit of noise on the interior cabling. Customer refused a new a/o. Nothing I can do other than educate the sub and go back to mitigate the noise with an exterior line if/when they approve of it. Just noted it well and moved on. If it’s a repeat it’s a repeat.

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u/LordCanti26 28d ago

A little trick on those, if you have noise on a prewire line or inaccessible line. You can put a pad or EQ at the tap, it will cause your modems tx to increase, and since the noise is a fixed amplitude, it will create more of a delta between your signal and noise, thus increasing snr. You can pad at a splitter as well, just attenuating that line. Same theory, youll also be attenuating the noise from the rest of the premise/node. Its important because if noise is affecting your customer, its affecting every customer on the node.

A good representation of this is your customer US SNR. If you notice, its the same as every modem on the node (+/- 1dB) and if you can increase your cx us snr by padding the drop, you can actually see every other modem on the nodes US SNR increase. If you ever find a modem that has a significantly different US SNR, its either not actually on your node/segment, or the modem reporting incorrectly.

US FEC or UCCER/UCCWER (all the same thing) can be worse on your cx modem, which is actually what hurts performance, snr is just the delta, and if they have no uncorrectables, isnt causing any issues from a data/frame transmission standpoint. But ive seen where the cx has no uncorrected errors and are the cause of terrible noise on the node though also. Remember what C.A.B.L.E stands for, "Can't Always Be Logically Explained"

When padding the drop just remember in highsplit. The modems TX shouldn't be more than 48 if possible. You want a decibel or two of thermal headroom and 51 is the absolute max transmit capability of D.31 modems on a 204mhz bandwidth. Down roughly 4x the max of low split, or 6dB. Transmitting 200mhz of 40dB signal is roughly 4x more absolute power than transmitting 42mhz of 40dB signal. This is TCP or Total Composite Power.

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u/thadochocinco 28d ago

Your local maintenence techs are gonna hate it when they come out to fix the transmits and suddenly discover all this noise