Today I was contacted by a new customer who had found my small add in the Yellow Pages.
On arrival at his home in Himbleton he informed me that he had lost reception on both of his TV's some days before and was now starting to get bored watching just DVDs.
I initially thought it was going to be straight forward spotting that he had a 12 volt power supply attached to the back of his main TV in the lounge. I Quickly established that this was working and then moved on to check all connections, again all of which were ok.
As the property was out in the countryside and built in the 1960s I guessed that the run of coax to the loft then to the mast-head amplifier & then on outside to the TV aerial was probably not going to be in a straight line or indeed straight forward, so I quizzed the customer as to what he knew of this run of coax.
At that point I was shown into the bedroom wardrobe above the lounge. Here there was a surplus of 2 meters of coax and a poor coax to coax joint, "that's it" I said, this has to be the problem, often this type of coax joint will eventually go open circuit with the passing of time and not allow the 12 volts pass up to the amplifier, but in this house and this time it was just not to be.
Checking the Masthead amplifier in the loft I confirmed that it was in good condition and that there was also a good signal arriving into it from the Malvern transmitter.
Being sure that there had to be a problem with the coax cable I again quizzed my customer as to what he knew about the run of coax cable.
This time I was shown into the kitchen where I was told that the coax cable ran through the wall from the lounge into and under the back of the kitchen units.
Removing the kick boards under the kitchen units immediately exposed a TV coax Y splitter, normally this alone is all it takes to disrupt the 12 volts in it's path to the amplifier but removing the Y split still made no difference. There just had to be something else.
Using a torch and scrambling around on the kitchen floor, looking under the units I spotted it......at last.......coax that was chewed completely through by a bored or hungry mouse.
By replacing this length of coax cable cured the problem.
I guess with this very cold weather that we are now experiencing our four legged friends are just as keen as we are to get out of the cold.
