TDR’s have long been part of the core toolset that Maintenance Techs rely on to do their jobs, but they haven’t really changed much in decades until recently. In this episode, Karl Oberlin from VIAVI will explain how the different types of TDR’s work, and reflects back on the decades that he spent as a Maintenance Tech earlier in his career to explain how the differences apply to technicians in the real world today.

In this conclusion of the two-episode antenna segment, Ben and Mark will focus on recent antenna developments and how they have evolved to support wideband frequency capabilities of next-generation leakage meters. Numerous real-life examples are provided to aide in understanding and applicability to the everyday life of a typical technician.

In this first of a two-episode segment, Trilithic/VIAVI leakage veteran Mark Darragh is joined by Ben Stelle, lead Engineer for VIAVI Leakage systems, to demystify how antennas work and take the discussion down to a level understandable by technicians and managers alike. This fundamental knowledge is helpful to make sense of how leakage tools are used and how to be most effective with them.

This episode concludes the discussion on how cable pioneers developed innovative but simple tools to find shielding weaknesses in their networks including inside of subscriber homes. The interactive discussion gives an inciteful view of how the problems system builders faced like upstream ingress drove the evolution these solutions into the advanced connected systems that we take for granted today.

In this episode, John Bush with VIAVI interviews industry veteran Terry Bush regarding the challenges he faced in starting up cable systems in the 80’s, and how it drove development of innovative solutions. This interactive discussion covers the history of how we got from using step attenuators and AM radios to the launch of analog leakage tools.

We’ve covered the three main levers MSO’s have at their disposal to increase upstream capacity, but how will these play out over time? In this last episode of season 1, we’ll take out our crystal ball and discuss where we see the future of broadband going and what should be considered to stay ahead of ever-growing broadband demand.

By now OFDM is old hat to most of us, but OFDMA is finally being tapped to help get more capacity form every precious Hz of upstream spectrum. In this episode, VIAVI experts will share what we’ve learned from supporting MSO OFDMA deployments around the globe.

Adding more carriers is an obvious way to increase upstream capacity, but what to do when your spectrum is full? In this episode, we’ll discuss the mid and high-split options and what it takes to successfully deploy them.

Splitting nodes has been the go-to method of increasing broadband capacity available per-subscriber, but overflowing hubs create challenges to their use. Listen in to VIAVI experts discuss DAA types, how they overcome many MSO challenges, and real-life experiences of field rollouts.

In this episode, learn about the three main options that MSO’s have relied on to increase upstream capacity, and how each has evolved to remain viable as networks. This will lay the groundwork for follow-on episodes where each method will be discussed in detail.