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 August 1999 Issue
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Cable-Tec Expo: A Really Big Shoe...
By Ron Hranac
This years Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Cable-Tec Expo was another record-breaker, both in terms of attendance and overall quality. A tip of the hat to the Societys national headquarters staff and everyone else involved in making Expo a success.
SCTEs preliminary estimates put overall attendance in the 11,000 range. As for show quality, the Engineering Conference panels featuring cable company chief executive officers and chief technical officers were superb. All of the workshops I attended were excellent, and the exhibit hall was nicely laid out, easy to get around and had generally good traffic most of the show. I was especially pleased to see that a dear friend and talented engineer, Antonio Huerta, was named SCTEs Member of the Year. That recognition was well-deserved for his dedication to the Society.
Book signings
SCTEs bookstore offered several book signing sessions by the authors of a number of excellent publications. Walt Ciciora, Jim Farmer and Dave Large were on hand autographing Modern Cable Television Technology, an outstanding book reviewed in this column last month. Other authors included Francis Edgington and Jeff Thomas (Digital Basics for Cable Television Systems); Jim Kuhns (The Satellite Calculations Handbook); Steven Biro (The CATV Engineers Antenna Handbook); Jay Junkus (DigiPoints, Volume One); and Dean Stoneback (Broadband Return Systems for Hybrid Fiber/Coax Cable TV Networks). One person who had appeared for book signings at several prior Expos was definitely missed this year: William Grant, author of Cable Television, now in its third volume. Bill passed away in December.
As Cable-Tec Expo grows each year, it becomes more difficult to see it all. This year was even more interesting because, for the first time in my career, I got to spend time on the "other side of the fence" in one of the exhibit hall booths. Or, as one longtime friend (an industry vendor who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons) said with a grin, "Welcome to the dark side."
As it turned out, other commitments kept me elsewhere most of the show. I wound up spending a total of about an hour in the booth over three days, but my colleagues at HSA Corp. gave me some good-natured ribbing and told me that would change at the National Show. By the time you read this, I will have paid my booth duty dues in Chicago.
Assorted goodies
One of the things I enjoy doing at any conventionCable-Tec Expo in particularis wandering the exhibit hall looking for some of the more unusual and interesting things on display. While I didnt get a chance to stop by every booth this year, I did manage to find a number of neat goodies in the booths of both large and small companies.
Cable Innovations: Fred Runkle and gang introduced a line of fuseless line passives, an interesting concept that removes a potential weak link in our powering chain. I stopped by to see just what they did to the circuits to allow operation without fuses or buss bars. The bottom line is heavy duty, given that 14-gauge wire is used to wind the inductors, and board traces and other components are very robust. A quick peek at the insides of the new passives suggests to me that they wont easily be a weak link. As for the obvious question about routing or blocking power, that can be dealt with in most cases with a novel power-blocking housing-to-housing connector.
Cheetah: Return path management. Need I say more? OK, I will. Cheetahs new Phasor System uses intermediate frequency digital signal processing (IF-DSP) for upstream signal analysis. One feature that will be useful for identifying unknown reverse path carriers is Phasors ability to demodulate AM, FM and single sideband signals.
CommScope: If youve read even part of what Ive written over the years, you know that Im a fanatic about good subscriber drops. CommScope has a new series of corrosion-resistant drop cable called Bright Wire. The cables center conductor and shield are chemically treated during the manufacturing process, producing corrosion resistance that CommScope says works better than powdered treatments or conventional flooding compounds. The premium for this is about a dollar a reel, which in my book is pretty cheap insurance.
Digital reverse: No, this isnt the name of a company that was exhibiting at Expo. Its technology that was being touted by both General Instrument and Scientific-Atlanta. Heres the idea: When the 5-40 MHz reverse spectrum reaches the node, the entire spectrum is digitized and transported to the headend via fiber as a digital signal. In a nutshell, the 5-40 MHz reverse spectrumdesired upstream signals, ingress and everything elsegoes into a powerful analog to digital (A/D) converter and some other circuits before modulating the laser. In the headend, the output of the upstream receiver passes through processing circuits, including a digital to analog (D/A) converter, which changes the digital signal back to the original 5-40 MHz spectrum. The idea is that lower cost upstream lasers can be used, and time division multiplexing (TDM) can be applied at the node to digitally combine several digitized return spectra onto one fiber. Keep your eyes on this technology.
Digitrans: When I stopped by Digital Transmission Equipments booth, Clayton Dore and Mason Truluck showed me real-time satellite reception and decryption of DigiCipher II programming. While satellite reception demos at conventions are nothing new, what was unique here was that this was the first time a company licensed by General Instrument has successfully received and decrypted a DigiCipher II signal. Nice feather in the cap for the folks at Digitrans.
Hewlett-Packard: H-P was showing a new low-cost cable TV spectrum analyzer that is based on its L1500 series. Availability was scheduled for July, so by the time you read this you should be able to get your hands on one.
Matrix Test Equipment: Matrix is best known for the companys multicarrier signal generators used for broadband carrier-to-noise (C/N) and distortion testing. Jack Kouzoujian showed me the new Model ASX-16-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) 256-QAM generator. This device can generate the usual multiple continuous wave (CW) carriers, plus AM, quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), and 4-QAM through 256-QAM test signals. This will provide a nice way to test active device performance with various combinations of CW and digitally modulated carriers.
Mega Hertz: Steve Grossman had a number of neat goodies on display. Among my favorites was a coaxial surge suppressor made by TII Industries. Its for use in the subscriber drop and is available in several configurations, including double female F ground block, standalone double female F, and male F/female F.
Multipower: Bob Bridge (Multipower) and Jorge Restrepo (Integral Broadband) were all smiles as they demonstrated what they call "outage prevention without batteries." The patented double power source (DPS) is in a nutshell line power inserters with the ability to automatically switch to a redundant power feed from an operational power grid in the event of a loss of commercial power in the primary power grid.
Times Fiber: TFCs TX10-15 low loss drop cable is drop cable on steroids. How else to describe half-inch drop cable that has the same attenuation performance as 0.500 feeder cable? Its available in most of the usual drop configurations: plain, flooded, messengered, 60-percent, quad shield and so on. Intended applications include just about anything that requires the performance of traditional hardline feeder cable but the flexibility of drop cable.
Visionteq: "RF Grooming R Us" might be appropriate for Visionteq and its headend combining equipment. Its RCD-1001 and RCD-1002 are the best reverse path combiners and distribution units Ive seen.
Wrap-up
There you have it. Another Cable-Tec Expo goes down in the record books as a "really big shoe" (if you know where that came from, youre dating yourself), definitely appropriate considering this year is also the Societys 30th anniversary. CT
Ron Hranac is vice president of RF engineering for High Speed Access Corp. in Denver. He also is senior technical editor for "Communications Technology." He can be reached via e-mail at
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