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TIL the $80 I spent on a signal level meter at a pawn shop in Reno saved me on a job where nothing made sense
Two years back I was fighting a weird pixelation call on the third floor of an apartment complex, and my cheap $25 tester kept saying the line was fine while the customer kept calling back. I finally broke down and grabbed a used meter from a pawn shop on Virginia Street for $80, and it showed a return path spike that my knockoff never would have caught. For the guys running six or seven trucks, do you trust the cheap testers or is a real meter just part of doing the job right?
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alice_harris356d ago
I mean, I get why the good meter saved you there, but saying the cheap testers can't cut it for most guys feels like a stretch to me. A $25 tester telling you the line is fine when it isn't usually means the tester is junk, not that every cheap one is useless, and a lot of the cheap digital ones read signal and MER just fine for everyday installs. The truth is most pixelation calls come down to bad fittings, chewed cable, or a splitter going bad, and you can find those without an $80 pawn shop meter. Dropping real money on a meter only makes sense if you're chasing return path stuff or hard to find ingress all day, which sounds like what you ran into. For a guy doing basic service calls, a decent $40 to $60 tester plus a toner gets the job done more often than not. Maybe it's just me but I'd rather spend that $80 on good compression fittings and a spare drop.
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