By Roy Ehman, Jones Intercable
Outage control is an area of major concern throughout the cable television industry, not only from the standpoint of maintaining customer revenues, but also for insuring reliability and longevity of CATV system hardware.
Power problems can plague a CATV system. Transient voltage surges and spikes induced by lightning or caused my sheath currents and utility switching operations are a very serious threat to reliable cable system operations.
This paper will describe a new method for protecting the 60 volt plant. A design using extremely rugged semi-conductors to shunt surge currents to ground, enables active and passive devices to become essentially immune to damage caused by high voltage transients.
We will present the technical results of initial laboratory research, as well as actual cable system tests. A detailed description of how spikes and surges are created in the CATV environment provides a basis for evaluating effectiveness and reliability of this approach. Several illustrations supporting the research data are included.
Our paper proposes a unique solution to several of the contemporary problems facing all CATV system operators: Outage control, hardware protection and customer satisfaction.