Coaxial Cable Tracing

[reggie14]

I bought 1970s home that was obviously built before cable TV. Coax was run to a handful of rooms haphazardly, teeing off at various places in the house, but apparently all running back to my utility room.

I've been using a weird combination of 1) ethernet runs where I could run them along baseboards, 2) powerline networking to jump to other rooms on the same circuit, and 3) wireless bridges for everything else. I've been having a lot of reliability problems with one of my wireless bridges, so I've been looking for other options. MoCA seemed like a good option.

I lucked out in one location. I hooked up a MoCA adapter to a coax line next to one of my main switches, and another near my problematic wireless bridge. Luckily it just worked.

But, I have one other location. I did my best to trace the wires back visually, but ultimately there was a lot of guesswork. And I apparently guessed wrong. I think. I'm not getting a network connection at the third location.

I got this cable tester, hoping to use it to trace cables, but it doesn't work. It just says there's an open fault- even between the locations where it's working. So that this point I don't really know what to try anymore. I've got a big bunch of unmarked cables all ending in my utility room, but I don't really know what to do with them.

Any ideas?

[Fuzzy]

If the coax is run all haphazardly, I wouldn't waste your time trying to get decent MoCA results from it. If you have a location relatively central to the home (the utility room, possibly, maybe even just the wall at the end of a closet), it will be worth it to properly install cat5 wherever you might want it, and get a decent switch. Whether it's crawling through the attic or through a crawlspace, it will be worth it in the end to have a real network in place.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

If the coax is run all haphazardly, I wouldn't waste your time trying to get decent MoCA results from it. If you have a location relatively central to the home (the utility room, possibly, maybe even just the wall at the end of a closet), it will be worth it to properly install cat5 wherever you might want it, and get a decent switch. Whether it's crawling through the attic or through a crawlspace, it will be worth it in the end to have a real network in place.

Electricians are ridiculously expensive where I live, and I strongly suspect someone would have to open some walls to get Cat5 some of these places (and I'm neither willing nor able to do it myself). It's a three level townhome, so access to locations on the main/middle floor is very difficult. If I planned to live here for >5 years that might be worth it, but I'm not willing to spend that much money on this.

MoCA seems to be working reasonably well between two locations that are one the complete opposite corners- the basement on one end to the 2nd floor on the other. I was a little surprised it worked right away, although I kind of suspected the previous homeowners had TVs in both locations before. The last one is a much shorter run. I'm 90% sure what cable that one is, but I'm not sure what the other ones are connected to.

[jusjoken]

It doesn't look like this unit has a toner included but there is one available

I have a similar device with a toner tool where i connect the device at the destination and the go to the utility room and use the toner tool to probe each cable end till i get a tone and that's the cable.

k

[tmiranda]

Buy a new house

[KeithAbbott]

If you have a 802.11ac wifi network, buy a range extender along the lines of this: http://netgear.com/home/products/net...rs/EX7000.aspx

You can disable the "extender" feature, and just use it to connect the five gigabit ethernet ports to your wireless router/access point. That's how I currently have it set up, I'm getting a solid 878 Mbps throughput.

I have one of my HD300s connected up to it, and I can't tell any difference between using it with the extender or having a hardwired connection to the HD300.

Honestly, I've tried other wireless extenders and devices that ship IP over power line, none of them worked well for me. The 802.11ac extenders are the first ones that I've found that have sufficient speed to work well.

[JustFred]

You've already identified the most likely solutions: hard-wired cat-5, WiFi, powerline and MoCA.

Cat-5 will always be the most reliable solution, assuming you can get the wires run. Once in place, it always works. It's bandwidth is known and consistent. None of the trial-and-error that often comes with the other choices.

That Klein cable tester has one significant limitation: it only works with point-to-point wiring. It can't identify a coax cable run that has one or more splitters between the endpoints. This explains why you have one coax run that reports "open fault" even though it passes MoCA signals; there's probably at least one splitter somewhere within that run. Using a toner-style cable tracer can give better results in this case.

Locating the hidden splitter(s) may require examining behind each wall plate to see if there's a splitter in the wall.

Given the age of your house, it's likely that all of the coax is RG-59, which is NOT MoCA-friendly (lots of signal loss). Best chances for a successful MoCA installation are with RG-6. MoCA 2.0 wants splitters rated up to 2GHz. A previous tenant's gold RadioShack 600 MHz ones can cause headaches.

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by jusjoken

It doesn't look like this unit has a toner included but there is one available

I have a similar device with a toner tool where i connect the device at the destination and the go to the utility room and use the toner tool to probe each cable end till i get a tone and that's the cable.

Yes, from what is being described, a "Toner tool" would probably be a very good idea. That will also help identify "split' connections and where they go throughout the house if you're really ambitious.

Sounds like the right tool for the job isn't being employed just yet. He has a good tester for "a known path" but he's dealing in unknown paths, so the toner is needed.

Beyond that, looks like everyone else has covered things pretty well. Somewhat surprised the advisory is for Cat5 and not Cat6. But then for the majority of users, they probably won't notice the difference for some time to come, as most home computers have a hard time maxing out Cat5 because of i/o constraints on their hard drives.

[NetworkGuy]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Electricians are ridiculously expensive where I live, and I strongly suspect someone would have to open some walls to get Cat5 some of these places (and I'm neither willing nor able to do it myself). It's a three level townhome, so access to locations on the main/middle floor is very difficult. If I planned to live here for >5 years that might be worth it, but I'm not willing to spend that much money on this.

You do not need an electrician to run Cat-5. See if there is a home theater place nearby. Their installers have all of these cool drills that let them run wires between floors without opening walls. Something most electricians do not have. Plus they are much better at concealing wires than electricians.