toobfreak
Tungsten/Glass Member
OTHER IDIOTS. I once went into a doctors office who had the View on. There was no way to change the channel, the staff wouldn't give me the remote, I could find no power button and the coax connector was too tight for me to unscrew. Everything was up on the wall on a bracket. So I borrowed a stapler from the lady at the window, climbed on a chair and stapled the coax, then used my multi-tool side-cutters I carry to cut the back off the staple leaving the metal inside.
Pins work too.
The metal pierces the coax insulation and changes the characteristic impedance of the wire even if you don't hit the center conductor by changing the electrical capacitance of the dielectric thus causing an impedance mismatch like a brick wall to the signal, and the signal is reflected back rather than passed through.
Picture and sound went off, I returned the stapler, thanked her, left and found a better doctor. Since the outer jacket is self-healing, it is next to impossible to find much less remove the metal and so they probably had to bring a tech in to run a whole new coax through the wall from wherever it connected outside once he even figured out why the TV wasn't working. Who knows, maybe they thought it was the TV and replaced that too.
