Have we really come that far?

[Perry Holbrook]

For the last week we have been having trouble with our cable provided internet service. It would go off for several hours and then magically come back on again (the modem was losing connection). This happened about every day, usually in the middle of the day, until it went out Sunday while my wife needed it for important business.

I called for a service tech visit for Monday morning. Showed up on time, spent a lot of time looking everything over, etc. Puzzled, he spoke with a supervisor, who came over with a special meter and informed me I had "wee woob" on the line and he would go fix it.

He left and was back soon, telling me the problem had been fixed. I couldn't let it pass without a little more info, like what the heck is "wee woob" (a technical term). He told me that no one knows for sure, that they have had several discussions with manufactor, who is also at a loss other than they know it has something to do with the ground plane of the amp installed in the main cable line up along the road. Although they don't know exactly what it is, they do know how to fix it when it occurs.

He told me he went down the road to the pole where the amp enclosure was located, climbed the pole and, I swear this is what he said, "hit it with a big stick". Wee Woob gone.

So my question is, have we really come that far if today's fix to our technical electronics that brings us TV is the same as it was 50 years ago when we just banged the side of the TV to jar the tubes back in place to get it going again?

Perry


I do realize that this could be a standard gag they pull when they can't find a problem, but if it was, this guy should be nominated for an Oscar. He went into great detail about the steps they had taken, etc. (And the problem is indeed fixed.)

[Bill Davis]

It would be very interesting to find out if he really "went down the road to the pole where the amp enclosure was located, climbed the pole and..."hit it with a big stick". "

Did you observe him actually taking that remedial action or was his statement part of performance to get the nomination?

[Perry Holbrook]

I think he actually did it (he did leave and come back, but I didn't go with him). He did explain that for whatever reason, the ground for the the amp is lost. He said in all cases where they detect this funny signal curve, that it is always the amp. He seemed very sincere and almost ashamed to tell me how he fixed it. He said that the amp was from Scientific Atlanta and the other brands have not shown the problem. I may have been the butt of a joke, but I really feel like they can't find the problem but have found what fixes it.

Perry

[John M Wilson]

I worked as an engineer in a manufacturing plant in the 80's when we were first starting to automate like crazy. Our plant was hundreds of acres in size, and there were grounding rods every couple hundred feet. The first summer of operation, we began having lots of mysterious problems, which we (eventually!) traced to differentials in ground. In the summer, when the soil would dry out, we would see it occur. A good rain would straighten things out again. It about drove us nuts figuring it out. We never called it "wee woob" or anything like that, but it definitely is an issue for sensitive electronics if the ground plane is not the same for units that are geographically separate. We never fixed it by hitting anything with a stick -- we sunk the grounding rods much deeper, and tied together areas that seemed to have the greatest potential.

So I don't know if I buy the "stick" part of the story, but I can understand about ground plane differentials. Seems like this problem would not be unique to your area, so maybe someone in that line of work can share more info...

[John Coloccia]

I have often in my career whacked something to get it working again. In fact, when something stops working one of the first thing I do is whack the table, wiggle some wires, etc. Now the trick here is if it actually starts working again, I go looking for the loose connection and FIX it.

I would have asked the tech if he was volunteering to hang out at the pole and whack it every time another "wee woob" occurred. LOL.

What he probably did, though, is something that you're not supposed to do (or have to do) but it fixes the problem anyhow and no one knows why. For example, they did something like float the ground, or they took some conductor or other component and moved it to the other side of the box, or something ridiculous like that. I'm pretty sure that he didn't physically smack anything and call it fixed :)

[Michael MacDonald]

thank god it wasn't a "large woob".

[Dan Hintz]

Interesting timing... yesterday morning I noticed both cable boxes (Verizon FiOS) weren't getting a usable signal. We've had a boatload f workers on the street tearing things up the last day and a half, so I assumed they had cut a cable... if it was still out when I got home fro work, I'd call. Sure enough, they were still out when I got home... but the internet was still up :confused: After a long call to the tech line, I started unplugging cables and bypassing things. My (relatively) new powered splitter was mostly dead. It was alive enough for the internet traffic to get through, but anything in the frequency range for cable was getting clipped.

No amount of whacking with a stick will fix it, so back to the shop it goes :(

[Belinda Barfield]

thank god it wasn't a "large woob".

You beat me to it! Hysterical!

[Victor Skellett]

I was a CATV tech for over 20 years. The only thing "fishy" about this story is that it was a "supervisor" who fixed the problem. (Apologies to all competent supervisors that may be out there.) As to the problem and the remedy I will attest to both being factual. We called these problems "dingers" because dinging the amp housing would make the problem disappear.

I believe dingers are caused by dissimilar metals between the amp station's motherboard and the amplifier module that plugged into it building a charge that altered capacitive reactance and therefore impedence resulting in a frequency "suck-out". Most always this problem, in our system, manifested in degraded picture quality on channels 22 and 7 (neighbors...frequency wise).

"Fixing" this problem was easy. Sometimes too easy. Just climbing the pole or throwing a ladder against the pole would discharge the "capacitor" and you could fix the problem without knowing it. It's a good idea to know that the problem is at "that" pole before you attempt to climb it. If you know the problem is at that amplifier and you have a long enough stick you really didn't need to climb it. Just give it a rap. Or throw a rock at it. Or...if that pole is a hundred feet off the road in a muddy farm field and you're a good shot with a pellet gun you don't even have to get out of the truck.

RF is a funny thing.

[Dan Hintz]

I believe dingers are caused by dissimilar metals between the amp station's motherboard and the amplifier module that plugged into it building a charge that altered capacitive reactance and therefore impedence resulting in a frequency "suck-out".
Arguably the oddest-reading description I've ever seen... and I've been doing this for 30 years ;)

[Rob Wright]

I call the method of fixing your problem "percussive maintenance" in my shop. When I hit something with a bigger hammer or the side of my fist - it usually only fixes it 1% of the time - but I feel better.

[Jerome Hanby]

Funny how things like that get into practice. Sometimes they actually make sense. Company in Huntsville, Intergraph, was building very high end graphics workstations. Their needs were so far ahead of the industry that the only way they could produce the circuit boards for their graphic processors was with this nearly one of a kind machine from the Netherlands that created a four layer circuit board by actually laying down wire on the drilled substrate for each layer, then all four layers were bonded together. While this let them create a circuit board far more complex than any other method at the time, the boards were prone to shorts between the layers. One of their technicians discovered that by bracing the bottom of the board, holding the top, and beating the crap out of the middle, he could often remove the shorts and an otherwise very expensive piece of trash could still be used. They coined the term Dawson-flexing after him and that technique was highly effective until circuit board technology finally caught up with their needs.

On the other hand, folks do get some funny ideas. I was working with a communication customer over the phone years ago. His complaint was that every year starting around Thanksgiving and ending shortly into the new year, their data terminal would get bursts of garbage characters. They had never been able to solve the problem, even though they gave it a shot every year. Dove season in this part of the county coincided with their problem period and the customer's theory was that it was bird shot in the telephone lines from the hunters taking pot shots at sitting doves. I dialed into his modem with my test unit and was also able to see bursts of trash characters, but I noticed that they were very regular. I asked if they had any florescent lights acting us and was informed that they were all working fine. So I told the guy to listen to me on the phone and I would say now every time I saw the burst and he should look around the office to see if anything was happening as I said now. We did this for a few minutes and he reported that nothing was happening...except for the lights flashing on the Christmas tree... the shinny aluminum Christmas tree with the blinking lights wrapped around and around it. It's possible that those Dove hunters were sneaking that tree in every year, so maybe the customer wasn't all wrong about the cause:confused:

[Dan Hintz]

On the other hand, folks do get some funny ideas. I was working with a communication customer over the phone years ago. His complaint was that every year starting around Thanksgiving and ending shortly into the new year, their data terminal would get bursts of garbage characters. They had never been able to solve the problem, even though they gave it a shot every year. Dove season in this part of the county coincided with their problem period and the customer's theory was that it was bird shot in the telephone lines from the hunters taking pot shots at sitting doves. I dialed into his modem with my test unit and was also able to see bursts of trash characters, but I noticed that they were very regular. I asked if they had any florescent lights acting us and was informed that they were all working fine. So I told the guy to listen to me on the phone and I would say now every time I saw the burst and he should look around the office to see if anything was happening as I said now. We did this for a few minutes and he reported that nothing was happening...except for the lights flashing on the Christmas tree... the shinny aluminum Christmas tree with the blinking lights wrapped around and around it. It's possible that those Dove hunters were sneaking that tree in every year, so maybe the customer wasn't all wrong about the cause:confused:
These are the types of problems I love to solve. No immediately discernible cause, but with patience (of which I have surprisingly little, ironically) and a keen eye/thought process, the truth will out itself. That's when I love being an EE...

[Jason Roehl]

Great. Another "immutable" truth out the window. Conventional wisdom is that if you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem. Now you're fixing electrical problems with a hammer. What is this world coming to?

[Belinda Barfield]

Are wee woobs related to gremlins? Just curious.

[Perry Holbrook]

An update. Wee Woob came back yesterday. With a lot of effort I got the same tech back to the house a few minutes ago. Turns out, he is a senior service tech (not supervisor). He said this time he was actually able to document the problem. The other day, he went to an amp about 2000 ft away that he "hit", since when he came back it was OK he assumed that he had found the correct amp. He confirmed what someone else here said, in that sometimes just bumping the pole with a ladder will correct the problem so that by the time he acutally gets up to the amp, it's already fixed. Today he went to an amp only 800 ft from my house, and when he reached the amp "wee woob" was still there. He found a screw that was a little loose, but wasn't really certain if that is what fixed it.

He said that sometimes just a heavy truck on the highway can jar it enough to "fix" it. One other thing he said was that it seemed to happen more on an amp that has been opened a lot, to add modules, etc.

Anyway, I think I've got my answer to my original question. We haven't really come that far with our service techniques when it comes to TV repair.

Interesting.

Perry

[Dan Hintz]

He said that sometimes just a heavy truck on the highway can jar it enough to "fix" it. One other thing he said was that it seemed to happen more on an amp that has been opened a lot, to add modules, etc.
Sounds like cold solder joints, cracked PCB traces, and environmental intrusion are things to check... if it happens more on boxes that are worked on a lot, it's either the stress put on connections from continually moving/flexing them, or it's detritus finding it's way onto the board from being open to the environment so often.

[John Coloccia]

Like Dan, my career as an engineer in radar, robotics, semi-conductor and electro-optics has put me in the middle of quite a varied collection of electronics. The only time bumping something ever did anything is if there is some component coming loose, corroded/bad connections or something is rattling around in the box.