Backtalk

The Oregon Gore-Techs, this year’s Comcast CommTech Jeopardy champions, prevailed against the Minnesota 1080is and the Nashville City Players in the final round of this year’s event in Charleston, SC. This year’s National Cable Television Cooperative Winter Educational Conference in Albuquerque included 43 exhibitors, representation from 153 member companies, and lots of good discussion. Day 1 included a cable vs. DBS data dump from Bruce Leichtman and a review of VoIP launches from three members: New Wave Communications COO Jim Gleason, Massillon Cable TV President Robert Gessner and Northland Cable SVP Technical Services Jack Dyste. Day 2 featured discussions of all digital, content distribution, wireless data, HD, VOD, etc., as well as a survey of the competition from CableLabs COO Chris Lammers. NCTC President Jeff Abbas and Lammers chat afterwards. People Motorola Hires Chief Architect Motorola recently appointed Dr. Hamid Ahmadi as the company’s first chief architect. He will develop a unified architectural framework to support Motorola’s Seamless Mobility vision and lead strategic hardware and software architecture planning across all Motorola businesses and R&D. Wave7 Selects Bryant VP Worldwide Sales Wave7 Optics said that Jack Bryant has joined the company as the new VP of Worldwide Sales. Bryant was most recently president and CEO of Concurrent Computer Corp. He has more than 23 years of telecommunications experience with Concurrent, Arris, General Instrument and Scientific-Atlanta. Nortel Names Buttermore VP Tom Buttermore, formerly of Adelphia Communications where he was vice president of data and voice engineering and operation, was recently named vice president and general manager of cable solutions for Nortel Networks. Buttermore is responsible for developing the company’s cable architecture, global market strategy, and all cable marketing activities. Test your Wits Here’s a sampling of questions heard at Comcast’s CommTech Jeopardy finals: How is the number five expressed as a binary number? What special interest group writes specs, interfaces and protocols for multimedia? A signal loss of __dB cuts the signal in half. One mile fiber = __ fiber kilometers? How many phases are in a QPSK and what do they start with? According to OSHA regs, at what level of noise do you need hearing protection? Tranfer of energy from one device to another is best achieved when both devices are of the same ______ What is the maximum allowed distance between an eyewash station and a battery storage location? Two RF carriers, one at 60 MHz and another at 130 MHz are producing beats in an amplifier. What are the four, second-order frequencies these carriers could produce? What part of the packet contains the data that is being sent? What level of DC voltage would you expect to find at amplifier’s DC test point? According to EIA/TIA standards, what color jacket contains fiber number 11? What is the most common passive element in a cable plant? Answers: 101; DAVIC; 3.01; 1.61; 4: 45, 135, 225, 315; 90 dBA; impedance; 25 feet; 70, 120, 190, 260; payload; 24; rose; coaxial cable