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By Ron Hranac

Hard to believe another Cable-Tec Expo has come and gone. This annual confab continues to get bigger and better each year. The size of the exhibit hall was up about 10 percent over last year (the number of exhibit booths remained the same), and attendance increased 5 percent.

This was, for me, perhaps the busiest Expo I've ever attended. I had so many meetings and other commitments that I was unable to attend any of the training workshops and attended only part of the Annual Engineering Conference. I did manage to squeeze enough time in an otherwise hectic schedule to visit a handful of booths to check out some of the latest gadgets and technology, one of my favorite pastimes at Expo.

Here, then, are my picks from Cable-Tec Expo 2001.

Agilent Technologies: Take many of the features of Agilent's workhorse 8591C spectrum analyzer, the 3010R sweep, some bits and pieces of the 8594Q digital analyzer, signal level meter functionality, then mix all of them together and put them in a sub-12-pound battery-operated box the company calls a tablet. What do you get? Agilent's new N1776A CaLan Cable Advisor.

With shipping expected to begin at the end of September, the N1776A offers spectrum analyzer functionality plus a tracking generator, and runs on Windows' CE operating system. This box can make most of the 8591C's cable measurements (about the only exception is headend video tests), do forward and reverse sweep and a host of digital measurements. The latter includes digital channel power, carrier-to-noise ratio, adjacent channel power (ACP), modulation error ratio (MER), error vector magnitude (EVM), pre- and post-forward error correction (FEC) bit error rate (BER), equalizer stress and bursted carrier measurements. Indeed, the N1776A does just fine with quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 16-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), and 64- and 256-QAM. Very nice.(www.agilent.com/cm/product/catv)

Alpha Technologies: Here's a milestone that's certainly worth mentioning: Alpha Technologies celebrated shipment of the company's one-millionth power supply this year, its 25th year serving the cable industry. (Hmmm, that says Alpha shipped its first power supply about the time I was working as an installer/technician for TelePrompTer Cable TV in the Pacific Northwest. What were you doing back then?) The folks from Alpha displayed a very nice chrome-plated power supply in their booth to commemorate the occasion, and held a brief awards ceremony to recognize the customer that received the one-millionth supply. A tip of the ol' hat to Fred Kaiser and crew. (www.alpha.com/main.php3)

Budco: Sometimes the not-so-high-tech goodies are among the most practical. Such is the case for Budco's new Slip Lock Marker, a patent-pending product to ID drop cables. The Slip Lock Markers are weather-resistant, heat-stamped snap-on drop markers that fit 59-series through 7-series cables. Each marker has one number or letter, so the drop may be identified with any combination of alphanumeric characters. Furthermore, the markers may be installed on a drop without having to disconnect the cable from the tap or remove the connector. (www.budcocable.com)

Colubris Networks: Wireless interfaces between a cable modem and a subscriber's personal computer (PC) are becoming more and more common. These products, available from companies such as Cisco Systems, Linksys and SMC, eliminate the need to install Category 5 Ethernet cabling between the modem and one or more PCs, and afford a degree of mobility for users in a residential or small business environment. Colubris Networks demonstrated their CN100 Wireless LAN Router, an 802.11b-compliant wireless product that operates in the 2.4 GHz license-free band. The CN100 supports 40- and 128-bit wired equivalent privacy (WEP) security; network address translation (NAT); dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP); and includes a built-in firewall. (www.colubris.com)

Panasonic: Two goodies in Panasonic's booth caught my eye. One was the KX-HCM10 Network Camera, a small color video camera that allows the user to view remote images through a PC. Simply plug the camera into an Ethernet network, and you and nine other users can simultaneously view images from the camera. Remote pan and tilt is possible. While not what could be called a full motion studio camera, the KX-HCM10 supports 7.5 frames per second at 640x480 resolution, as well as 15 frames per second at 320x240 or 160x120 resolution. One application that comes to mind is security monitoring in the headend, hub site or warehouse.

The other gadget in Panasonic's booth that I liked was their KX-HGW200 Concourse Broadband Networking Home Gateway. Similar to devices available from Linksys and SMC, this product connects between a cable modem and one or more PCs. It supports DHCP and has a built-in firewall. The KX-HGW200 also includes multiple LAN interface capability: regular wired Ethernet, wireless and phone wire (Home PNA 2.0). (www.panasonic.com/consumer_electronics/gate/default.asp)

PCT International: How small can you make them? Fiber nodes, that is. Would you believe a node in an apartment amp housing that's only 6-inches by 3.6-inches by 1.3-inches? PCT International's new mini node is an 870 MHz device with a single +18 dBmV RF output. Evaluation samples should be shipping by the time you read this. Get this: The one-way node's list price is $220, and a two-way node with distributed feedback (DFB) return laser will list for $1,100. If you want a Fabry-Perot (FP) return laser, an FP-equipped mini node will sell for less than $1,000. Powering is via a wall-wart: 15 volts DC at 500 milliamperes for the one-way node, and 1 ampere for the two-way node. Targeted applications include multiple dwelling units, businesses and strip malls. This product takes the cake for my show favorite. (www.pctusa.net)

Signal Vision, Inc.: You're familiar with in-line drop attenuators, right? Signal Vision has a new in-line drop equalizer in about the same form factor as those little attenuators. The company's SV-EQ-* is available in 3 dB, 6 dB, 9 dB and 12 dB values and covers the 5 MHz to 1,000 MHz spectrum. Insertion loss is no more than 0.5 dB at 1,000 MHz, and the devices are rated to pass power up to 500 milliamperes. Something else to note: The center conductor pin vise is a new patented design that can accommodate 59-series through 7-series cables without damaging the equalizer! Contact Signal Vision at for more information.

About those ribbons...

For those of you who did make it to Expo, you probably saw the infamous brown ribbons. They turned out to be so popular that the registration booth ran out of them in the first hour or two after registration opened. Seems I was the victim of a good-natured practical joke by some of my fellow Board members. No problem. My response? I am Ron Hranac!

Ron Hranac is a consulting systems engineer for Cisco Systems, and senior technology editor for Communications Technology. You may reach him at .

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