What is this???

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76nemo

76nemo

Senior Member
Location
Ogdensburg, NY
Just got done shoveling my butt off, (almost 3 hours), and had a service truck pull up in front of the house. They put in a panel on the pole with a six pack battery bank and inverter. It's an Alpha panel. What is it for?????


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Kind of looks like the Miami area?

They mount those on the ground here in Florida. I guess the pictures describes the precise reason they are open on a pole...
 
iwire said:
Often used to power CATV amplifiers, more important with more people doing phone over cable.
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Thanks Bob, I appreciate that. I would of gone and asked myself, but for one, I had no coffee or water to offer them, and two, I have been in the Scrooge mode, just wanting the holidays to pass. They are local, only about 15 minutes away. Darn good workers I must say. They must have been frozen:-?

I see these Alpha panels all over town, but not nearly that size. So......,moving on, can you tell me a little more about the system? There was an Alpha panel there before their install. What calls for the upgrade?
 
Kdawg67 said:
"Kind of looks like the Miami area?"

I didn't know it could snow like that in Florida.:smile:
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"They said in Miami it'll never snow.
Now it's snow in the palm trees,
Snow in the sand.
It snows all day for sixty dollars a gram."

------Miami Vice ; Jan Hammer
 
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Kdawg67 said:
"Kind of looks like the Miami area?"

I didn't know it could snow like that in Florida.:smile:
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The sand there is the same color. :cool::grin:


The upgrade may have been because the other install failed or was not working properly. (I do not mean failed as per inspection)



We see these going up all over, the competition is fierce, and the different companies are vying for peoples money.
In our area, these are mounted like 10-12 feet above the road surface.

P.S.
We had a lot of snow here the past 5 days, today it is raining.
 
Sixty bucks a gram?????? Geeezzz that's not cheap:wink:


I am curious as to this setup, those were some BIG batteries. The other panels I see around town don't look large enough to house batteries that size.


Bob's got my brain a thinkin', that's not good:wink:
 
Pierre C Belarge said:
The sand there is the same color. :cool::grin:


The upgrade may have been because the other install failed or was not working properly. (I do not mean failed as per inspection)



We see these going up all over, the competition is fierce, and the different companies are vying for peoples money.
In our area, these are mounted like 10-12 feet above the road surface.

P.S.
We had a lot of snow here the past 5 days, today it is raining.
Click to expand...

It's been 10-20 below here with the wind chill, you wonder why I fret the riverside calls:wink:
 
Often used to power CATV amplifiers, more important with more people doing phone over cable.

Often? Always has since day one. Those are power supplies and the batteries are for backup when utility power fails. They are located throughout the system. How did you think a cable system was powered?

-Hal
 
hbiss said:
Often used to power CATV amplifiers, more important with more people doing phone over cable.

Often? Always has since day one. Those are power supplies and the batteries are for backup when utility power fails. They are located throughout the system. How did you think a cable system was powered?

-Hal
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Hal, believe it or not, not all cable systems have had battery back up.
 
iwire said:
Hal, believe it or not, not all cable systems have had battery back up.
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our local cable company has no battery backup.


as for mounting height, out here in the sticks, they put those things right under the hardline. maybe to prevent vandalism?
 
Hal, believe it or not, not all cable systems have had battery back up.

When I was in the cable business many years ago that was true. But systems were smaller then and they didn't provide "semi-important" services like telephone. It was just TV and nobody cared if that went out for a few hours. For prolonged outages we would go to the power supplies affected and sit there with a generator.

Because there is no common system wide coax trunk with today's HFC systems which was used to distribute power along with the RF, greater numbers of power supplies have to be used. There has to be one at least per node- that's where the fiber ends and the coax begins. The node electronics and all the amps along the coax require power.

It's been my experience that even before HFC, at least the critical supplies that powered the main trunk actives all were changed to ones with battery backup. That's because if the trunk went down the consequences were wide spread. Eventually all supplies were changed out and I can't see any system today not using them unless either they don't care about reliability or the power company reliability is very good.

There are a number of reasons for adding a power supply, the system is being extended, more actives are being added or maybe they are being changed to something that requires more power than what was being provided.

-Hal
 
Hal, great info. Question: Are all of the power supplies basically in parallel, or are there carefully-placed DC-blocking isolators so each electronic component sees only one power supply?


Years ago, I lived in Northern Virginia, in Fairfax County, and they had a 2-coax system, with 60 channels on each one. The cable was siamesed quad-shield RG-59's. Interestingly, one cable's inner conductor had an extra insulation layer the other didn't have.

Added: They also simul-cast all of the movie channels in stereo on FM, so I could use Dolby Surround for matrix-decoded surround sound. It was better than nothing.
 
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Are all of the power supplies basically in parallel

60 V AC and it would be difficult to keep them all in phase so, no. Each supply handles it's own area with power isolation between them. That's why if one goes down a whole area loses service, especially if it is at the beginning.

Incidentally some systems are changing from 60 to 90 V so that's yet another reason for changing or installing new supplies.

-Hal
 
Back-up Power

Back-up Power

Our Local CATV-Charter Communications has little Honda generators in some of those boxes, waiting for the crew to come out and fire them off during an outage. Others get a little Honda tied on top with a bungee during the extended outages.
 
If the cable company is also offering phone service the PSC (public service commision) requires "I believe" 8 hours of backup in case of power failure for emergency phone calls... I.E. 911
 
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