Our local cable station has been having trouble with the community channel for about... ummm... 4 years now.

Today I happened to be there and fiddled with the hook up from the character generator to the cable head end (or whatever it's called) no luck at all. The channel worked fine when hooked up to the camera from another room when used for broadcasting live events so I suspected that the interference on the community channel might be cause by a ground loop (something I had never heard of until this BBS came along) and sure enough I unplugged the Character generator and plugged it into a closer outlet to the head end. Voila! Problem solved!

Thanks again empeggers!!!!



#170... previous deferrer in denial about not receiving one from the first mini-batch of Mark II's

Awesome. So you understand what a ground loop is now?

I didn't understand them completely (although I knew of their existence) until I got the Empeg and needed to resolve my ground loop problems.

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Tony Fabris

That really is amazing!
I never thought that ground loops could manifest themselves in that way.

Did you ask for a pay rise or you would put the problem back in?
Maybe just by a Lotto ticket!

Murray 06000047
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I never thought that ground loops could manifest themselves in that way.

Ha. Of course they can. Get this. Do you know what "Skywalker Sound" is? It's the audio post-production facility owned by Lucasfilm. They do a LOT of very high-dollar work for the film industry, lots of movies are mixed down there.

Last year, they spent a gazillion dollars re-working the grounding in the entire building. From what I heard, they tore up all the floors and installed basically a giant copper "net" under the flooring and tied every ground in the building to it. That net is connected to a super-duper high-grade made-for-NASA grounding rod. The engineers say the difference it made in their equipment noise is like night and day.

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Tony Fabris

I wonder if I can get a grounding rod from NASA for my car. Would probably work wonders for my Amp. :)

Reg_2845 Serial #00173

Tom, I know that SAAB does make Viggen jet fighters... but even that is a far cry from NASA equipment!

There's an IASCA competition next weekend (August 6) at Power Sounds on the Old Seward highway.... I'm thinking about driving down for it, maybe you might put in an appearence with your empeg?

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

The engineers say the difference it made in their equipment noise is like night and day.

Yeah but this was a video problem. I never really thought about the difference a ground loop could make to the picture quality/frame sync signal.
I did some work in audio in a studio where a 'black' generator sent a signal to every editing machine in the studios. just to keep the same sync rate. we never had any real sync problems, even with finnicky machines. but we could have!

Murray 06000047
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I have some idea. I wasn't totally sure but one day I was looking at the tv channel and asking my uncle (who works on the channel) about it. We were discussing it and I mentioned ground loops. He said that a technician had once said something about it but they never went any further than that with it.

Well, my uncle is away at school for a while and we needed a public notice on the system so me being the IT person in our town (ok... one of the 2 IT persons ) I was called on. I went up and figured out how to work the rig that they had there (MagicBox if anybody knows of that) and then I got curious about why the display over the cable system was so horrible. I replaced wires and plugged in other pieces of gear. There didn't seem to be anything wrong. So then I decided to check out the way everything was plugged into the power source. hmmm.... ok, power down the MagicBox. Plug it in over there, turn it back on. COOL! Now I got people all over the community praising me up!

It's nice sometimes to have a little technical knowledge. :)

As for the pay raise... I am holding this one for bargaining power... and I made sure not to disclose my solution. I emailed my uncle and told him I fixed it. He was curious as to how and I told him flatly, "Can't tell you that one... lets just say we were already talking about it once. Other then that. It's job security."

#170... previous deferrer in denial about not receiving one from the first mini-batch of Mark II's