Coaxial Cable Connectors, And How Far We've ComeI remember making my own RF coax cable RG-59 cables for video by purchasing an RG-59 tool, the connectors and making my own coaxial cable connectors. One of the advantages of doing it that way was that you could make cables as long as you wanted. If you wanted to pass them to the moon and back (well, OK, you couldn't pass them to the moon)¡ then you could create the wire for it. Since I ran a cable show called the Interactive Arts Channel from Access Tucson, years ago, I used to have to create Coax cables quite often. We would wire up jurry-rigged cables to get the show broadcast. Now, you can make your own category 5 cable as well. You just purchase the right tool, CAT5 wire, and crimp on a connector to either end. If you do a lot of Ethernet wiring, it'll come in handy. Or, the same is true for category 6, too. Rg6 coaxial cable connectors come in kits; you can purchase an installation tool which will crimp the connector onto the wire.
Can you make your own fiber optics cable? Yes you can. They also come in kits which have all that you might need to properly make the 'wire' (it's not called a wire any more if you're hitching up fiber cable, because there's glass inside that 'wire', not copper). You certainly can't fit coaxial cable connectors onto a fiber optics cable, though. Fiber optics has many different kinds of connectors that might be on your HDTV, or HD unit, so you'll have to check with your manual which it needs. If you have a fiber optics cable of one kind, you can purchase adapters which will allow you to fit it to another kind of optical fiber connector. If you have the old kind of coaxial cable connectors, though, those are very simple to put onto coaxial cable. With the right tool you just strip the wire to the right length (the tool cuts both the inside and tip lengths so they're both the proper lengths), then you slide on the connector, put the crimp side of the tool around the ferrule and squeeze. I would then pull on the connector to make sure it wouldn't come off and voila, there was a new cable. It being a television station, the cables that we used were the best you could buy. The connectors weren't anything special, though. I think Belkin made them. I always used to enjoy making cables. Cables were always needed for one thing or another. Sometimes we'd go on conferences. We were the technical crew, so we had to be prepared for anything; and the auditorium generally didn't have any knowledge of what you might need. If you asked them for RG-59 wire, they'd give you a blank stare. So, coaxial cable connectors were one of the things we'd bring with us. One time we were demonstrating a demo version of the software, so we traveled quite some way to get there. Whenever you had to go to a hotel such as the Radisson, you would figure that they'd have all the professional video wiring tools and such because other groups would so do such things; but we knew that we always had to bring all of our own tools and cables. In just 20 years, the 'Audio/Video' world has changed so much. The NTSC standard has been superceded by the HDTV format; the lowly RG-59 cable has been relegated to the junk pile. Digital is all the rage, even if people didn't even used to notice the poor quality of their portable MP3 player through its built-in speaker. But, now, people got to have that new fad even if they really couldn't care less what the quality of the audio is. |
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