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cable question

Old 04-10-03, 09:40 AM
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cable question

I currently have digital cable thru Comcast in Dallas. My cable has been out since Tuesday, 04/08/03. I have called several times to their customer service dept, They are telling me that my box is not working so they will need to send a service tech to fix the problem. I scheduled an appt for this Saturday.

My question is, if the box is not working, shouldn't the analog cable work if I connect them directly from the wall into my tv?
When I asked this question to the CSR, she stated that I should be able to receive the analog signal. I told her that I have had no reception since Tuesday. She then said that there is probably an outage and the only way to verify this is to schedule an appt with a service technician and that I would need to be present.
Does this sound right or are they "pulling the wool over my eyes"?

Thank you for your time,
Richard
Old 04-10-03, 10:08 AM
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Yeah, plugging it directly into the TV should work for all the analog channels... The people who work at the cable company (any cable company) are, in my experience, um.... morons - the procedure for an outage must be to send out a tech to check the box, there's no way they'll deviate from that no matter what you tell them. Just wait until the tech gets there, you're probably in for some more fun (I had one tell me that my DVD player was the reason my cable wasn't working ).
Old 04-10-03, 04:18 PM
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Just spoke withe the superviser. She said that the problem was that the whole apartment complex had the signal cut off. This was not a problem with the box. She said that they would use this problem to coach their CSR's in how to handle a call the right way(riiiight). A friend of mine told me that they had four cable trucks at the apartment complex working on the problem.

When I move out of this apratment, I am going to go with the dish.


Thanks for the reply
Old 04-10-03, 04:35 PM
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Originally posted by Richard70
When I move out of this apratment, I am going to go with the dish.
Why not go with the Dish now? By law, they must provide you with some means of having a dish installed. Unless trees are in the way, you should be able to get a dish no matter what the lease says.
Old 04-11-03, 08:40 AM
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Originally posted by Wolf Husky
Why not go with the Dish now? By law, they must provide you with some means of having a dish installed. Unless trees are in the way, you should be able to get a dish no matter what the lease says.
Really?. I did not know that. There are no trees in the way. My patio faces the north. So there lies the problem. The apartment manager stated that I could not attach a dish to the building to face the south.

I came home yesterday, no cable. I called the superviser yesterday and she told me that the problem is not with the apartment complex itself. It has something to do with the wall hookup. So they will send a tech out on Saturday as originally planned. The funny thing is, yesterday she was sure it was the whole complex, but it appears to be another excuse. I wander what I can do to remedy this situation as the are only interested in false excuses.

Mr Wolf Husky, what right do I have in order to have a dish installed?

Thnak you
Old 04-11-03, 01:40 PM
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This afternoon, I will go by the apartment complex I paint for and grab a copy of the rights and post them if I didn't accurately describe them here.

Basically, it says a landlord MUST provide some means of allowing tenants to set up a satellite dish. This is to prevent a cable company from monopolizing a neighborhood, apartment complex, etc, by making negotiations to block satellite service. If your landlord said you cannot "attach" a dish to the south side, you may be able to put a pole in the ground and install to that. Of course, laws only require a landlord to provide you with a way to install. (S)He can simply tell you to move into a south-facing apartment and install one on your patio/balcony.

Another thing you can do is talk to the people in the south-facing apartments. Find out if they would allow you to set a dish on their patio or attach it to the railing. Even better, ask them if they would be interested in getting Dish as well. You can easily feed up to 4 receivers on one dish using a Quad LNBF. There's nothing that says those receivers have to all be in one apartment/house. If they would allow you to do that, you could run cabling around the building into your apartment.

Dish Network only requires that separate units or dwellings have separate accounts. They do not require them to have their own dish and LNBF. Of course, you could offer the people in the south apartment "free" satellite TV by putting a receiver on your account in their apartment. Dish Network would have a problem with that if they ever found out, but how would they? Just don't let them charge up a lot of Pay-Per-View!!!! hehehe. I'm not suggesting you do this. I'm merely stating what Dish Network would and would not allow.

Dish Network should do a regular install for free. That includes attaching to buildings, but does not include pole installs (digging a 3 foot deep hole) nor trenching. I only charged for trenching about 10% of the time. Somehow, I got away with digging holes about 99% of the time. You can dig the hole yourself to save labor fees. If you are allowed to dig the hole (locate first~!~!), install an 8' pole (I don't remember diameter, sorry) in a 3' hole by pouring concrete and water around the pole. Fill the hole with the dirt and make sure the pole is 100% plumb.

On running the cabling, if you do it yourself.

Use RG-6. You don't have to buy $1/ft cabling. Generic RG-6 is all you need. You should be able to get some for a quarter a foot or less. People will tell you that you shouldn't run more than 100' from dish to receiver, but that's bogus. I think the longest run I have ever seen work just fine is about 160'. Sure, there's a bit of loss with a long run, but the signal strength of the channels more than adequate. (It really depends on where you are. We don't have much atmosphere up here at 7200' and I regularly hit signals around 125. I think you only need 100 or so. It has been a long time.)

You could either attach it NEATLY to the building (don't bother if it is stucco), and request paint from the landlord and paint the cabling the same color as the building. This would be less of an eyesore for the landlord/owner and would grease the wheels of your case. Or, you could "trench" at the side of the building and bury the cable against the building under 6" of soil. If you do this right, it will not disturb or tear up the ground. If you are lucky, there is landscaping or gravel against the building, which makes it easier to do this. I suggest getting a utility locate done if you plan on doing this. Gas, power, and water should be several feet deep. But, I have seen phone lines (which should be 18" deep minumum where I am) less than 4" deep. You don't want to hit the phone line to your building. You wouldn't want to hit sprinkler control lines either, which look like coax cables on the outside. On the inside, they will have 3 or 4 pairs of copper wires. Don't cut those! Yes, I speak from experience.

(The only day DNSC ever gave me 5 install jobs to do in one 10-hr day, I cut a sprinkler line on my 1st job and spent over an hour splicing it. The jobs aren't the time-consuming part of the day. It's the 100s of miles we drove every day, plus explaining the remote control to all the stupid people!) I think that was a 19-hr day. No biggie though with the nice overtime. I probably made about $350 that day.
Old 04-11-03, 05:47 PM
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Originally posted by Wolf Husky
Why not go with the Dish now? By law, they must provide you with some means of having a dish installed. Unless trees are in the way, you should be able to get a dish no matter what the lease says.
What law are you referring to? If you're referring to the Over-the-Air Reception Devices (OTARD) rule, you may be making too many generalizations.

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html

It's my understanding that this rule only applies to areas of the apartment that the resident has exclusive use over, such as a patio. The rule does not apply to common use areas, such as the grounds around a mult-unit building. The actual exterior wall of a multi-unit building is also considered to be a common area, so you may not be able to mount the dish to the building. If you're patio faces the wrong direction, you may be out of luck without special permission from the landlord.

Also, this rule only states that the landlord can't prohibit you from installing a dish in an exclusive use area. I don't think this can be read as that they must provide you with a means to install the dish.

If there's more legislation that I don't know about, though, I'd be glad to hear about it.

I just got Dish Network at my apartment, and I got a permission slip to put it on a pole out front, out of the way of the mowers. The pole was installed w/ the rest of the free installation.
Old 04-12-03, 04:07 PM
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I don't remember the exact wording either, but I'm pretty sure there's some rule that allows you to put up a dish in apartments. I was fine with cable so I never bothered.

I also recall in our apartment complex, there were people that got one of those five gallon buckets, filled it with concrete and stuck a pole in it and had it on their front porch.
Old 04-14-03, 10:06 AM
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I don't think they can ban you, but they can severely restrict it - such as the dish may not extend at all over the ground below (hence the 5-gallon bucket option).

My landlord required me to up my renter's insurance to a $1M liability coverage - no big deal since it was only another $10 per year. Unfortunately, it became a moot point since I miss the line to the satellite by 10 degrees.

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