After returning from Japan to Germany early October, I decided to move to a new place, a larger property with ample workshop space and gardens.

Needless to say, a major effort with tons of heavy test equipment and other stuff piled up…

Apart from the heavy lifting, apart from tap water, electricity and a tight roof, a fast internet connection is the most essential thing. This took quite some more effort than expected. First, the grounding system of the house needed an upgrade (otherwise the internet cable company would refuse to install their amplifiers and cable modem), and, that done, there was not enough signal going in and out the house to allow for the 1 Gb/s connection…. first, they changed all the stuff inside of the house, a full upgrade, but to no avail, finally, they marked a spot on the sidewalk.

Only hours later, strong men showed up, digging up the ground in the search for the internet…

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The connection here is delivered on CATV coaxial line for the last mile, so there is main line about 50 cm underneath the sidewalk, and there are taps/splitters, usually one splitter serving two houses.

From what I can tell, it is a 2x 15 dB tap, a quite common part in the CATV network. It took the crew just about half an hour to install. Great job.

The part, here is a clean shot, it has the connectors already mounted, and in the field, the cables are merely inserted and heatshrink tubing applied.

There are now a few interesting left-behinds, an old CATV house connection box with filters, I will test it out once there is more time.

After the installation job had been done one the road, it took just another two visits of the cable company to get all up and running! At least, they managed to do all this in less than a week.