The cable broadband access network is extremely complex. Hybrid fiber/coax (HFC), fiber-to-the-[feeder, building, curb, home, premises, tap], passive optical networks (PONs), digital video, DOCSIS®, remote PHY, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) – all of these technologies have their own technical information. And, for broadband cable technologists to be effective in their jobs, they need lots of information at their fingertips.
Let’s say you’re out in the field performing leakage measurements on CTA Channel 17 (yes, they’re called CTA channels now; the old EIA designation was deprecated years ago) and need to know the signal level at a dipole antenna’s terminals when the field strength is 50 microvolts per meter (µV/m).
