[Onramp]

RWCable I also have fond memories of analogue cable. I was only a kid when I used to get Children's Channel and Sky Channel - I loved watching the cartoons. But it had to go because the local cable company that had taken over the MATV network in our area had begun to charge for the service and my parents didn't want to pay so they got an aerial.

I missed my cartoons and it created a kind of nostalgia. When I was in my late teens, I ended up experimenting with analogue (and later, digital) satellite to get some of the channels back (by then my parents moved to a non-cabled area) - and I became interested in the tech itself, much more so than the content.

I never had a Jerrold box at the time the service was live - but I did end up getting to work with them on work experience, which was amazing. I got to go to the headend, visit customers out in the field with the techs, help install and remove attenuators, even overheard baby monitors and cordless phones coming back up the return path at the cabinet. (The wavetek-pro spectrum analyzer had a speaker built in). I saw how it all worked, from the NDS sat receivers to the scramblers and modulators, all the way down to the scruffy white cables running unprotected under lawns with T-pieces in the exterior walls of the houses.

To answer your question, the F button means "Function" and it had various uses. It was mainly used to display the serial number in Hex pairs in order to call someone at the headend when setting up or replacing a box and having them send a "hit" through the network to enable it.

I remember once we were in an area that had both an old build system and a new build - the old build was still active at the time and an amplifier had gone dead. when we removed the cover, an ants nest rolled out and plopped onto the pavement, ants scurrying everywhere.

Fun times and the best work experience I could have had! Shame there's nothing on TV any more, the content's not worth the license fee in my opinion.