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5 best hotel tech upgrades you’re going to find today

Let’s start this article off with some good news. The 2020s may have started off hard for hotel owners, but everything’s humming along now. This summer is expected to be the biggest ever for travel and hotels. While that will help your bank account in the long run, a lot of hotel owners have been cash strapped these last couple of years. That means necessary upgrades might have been skipped in order to make payroll. It was the right decision to make, but you might not be able to compete in this new market where demand is so high. With all of that said, here are 5 tech upgrades for hotel owners that are really worth the money. #5: New and upgraded wiring There are few sayings in the hotel industry more common than “If it ain’t broke...
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Revitalizing Your Home: 5 Steps to Transform and Protect Your Indoor and Outdoor Surfaces

In our busy lives, our homes go through a lot, inside and out. So, let’s do this together. From the inevitable blemishes on wooden flooring to the weather-worn patios, preserving the allure and utility of our surfaces is paramount for fostering a warm and inviting ambiance. Thus, we extend an invitation to embark on this collaborative journey with us. Let’s equip ourselves with the necessary tools, muster our determination, and commence this revitalizing endeavor together. Elevating Atmosphere and Value Enhancing both the inside and outside surfaces can greatly influence the vibe and value of your home. Gleaming floors, recently painted walls, and revamped outdoor areas can infuse your living space with a sense of freshness and...
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Can you use 1 booster for 5 buildings?

Can you use one cellular signal booster to cover five buildings? That question came through our social channels and it seemed like a good one for a blog article. The answer, as they say on TV, may surprise you. Yes you can do it. You can use something like this WilsonPro Enterprise 4300 and put the antennas in four different buildings. You can even use a splitter to add a fifth antenna if you want. It’s one of the most powerful and advanced cellular signal boosters ever made and gives you a lot of options for boosting signal in a large area. But, do you want to? In order to get signal to five separate buildings, you’re talking about a lot of cable. You’re possibly burying it or running it through underground conduits. That means...
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Ken Reid and Alan Arkush

December 7-13, 1985 This week Ken welcomes writer, producer, professor, director and all around good guy Allan Arkush to the show. Ken and Allan discuss Allan’s cool office, Allan’s record collection, Roger Corman, Emmy Nominations, directing or directing and producing over 400 episodes of TV, the path from 70s exploitation to 80s mainstream TV, having a high batting average of sold TV pilots. Fame, Summer pilot, Rock N Roll High School, telling stories through music, how popular Fame was in Israel, residuals, 80s NYC, directing videos for Elvis Costello, Bette Midler and Fleetwood Mac, the ones you turn down, why 1985 was a huge TV year for Allan, St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, being able to be a style chameleon, being a cinema...
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Know Your Anodes, Boat Owners!

Are you a boat owner who needs things like marine anodes? If you’ve ever shopped for these items, you’ve probably noticed that you have to buy these products by the type of metal they are made of. These devices tend to be made out of a variety of different metals. Which one is best for your boat motor? It depends on a variety of factors, including which type of boat motor you have and what type of waters your craft travels. To help you develop a better understanding about marine anodes, Solid Signal shares this important information about marine electrical accessories. Marine Sacrificial Anodes To understand the metals used in marine electrical accessories, you first have to understand what sacrificial anodes are. These devices are...
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How can you know that a distribution amplifier will work for you?

A lot of people think of me as “the blog guy” at Solid Signal. The truth is that I also help a lot of customers directly, and I work with our tech team to make sure everyone’s getting the right answers. One thing I hear over and over again is the confusion about amplifying cable, satellite, and over-the-air signals. A lot of folks don’t understand the way digital signals work, and just figure that “more power” is better no matter what. The truth is a little different. Believe me, I’d love to sell everyone out there a distribution amplifier, but most folks don’t need one. I hope that this article will help you figure out if you need an amplifier in your home. What’s the difference between a preamplifier (preamp) and a distribution...
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Everyone has an internet service provider. But do you need a second one?

Imagine your business without internet. I don’t mean the way it was back in the 1990s. I mean imagine trying to do business today without internet. The simple fact is, it can’t be done. You would lose pretty much all communication with the outside world. Your phone system probably travels through an internet connection. So does all of your written messaging. You’d lose the ability to process credit cards, your customers couldn’t reach you, and simply put, you’d be back to the stone age. A strong business can weather that kind of blow for a couple of hours, but can you imagine what would happen if an internet outage lasted several days? It could take months or years for business to recover, based on people being unable to reach you...
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When will pay TV companies carry ATSC 3 (NextGen TV) channels?

Every now and again, I feel the need to write about the proposed next generation of television services, called ATSC 3.0 or NextGen TV. If it’s ever put in place, sometime after 2027, it has the opportunity to revolutionize TV viewing as we know it. With ATSC 3.0, you could get 4K over the air. You could get on-demand content. There’s a whole suite of services that could make watching over-the-air a lot more like streaming. At this point in time, seven years after testing began, there are at least a few ATSC 3.0 channels in most major TV markets. You can buy devices that will let you decode these channels if you want to see what all the fuss is about. Knowing this, a customer recently asked this question: The answer’s a little more...
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Podcast #568: Open Source software could be the end of us all

In this off-topic podcast, we look at the scary amount of open-source software and the very idea that the internet itself could fail because of one dude who’s doing stuff in his spare time. Listen, comment, then shop at https://www.solidsignal.com or call 888-233-7563 for the best customer service. Listen to the podcast your way! Just choose one of the following: Option 1: Click on the image above to stream the podcast in your browser. If you use the YouTube player above, be sure to subscribe to get future videos delivered to you! Option 2: The Solid Signal Podcast is available on several podcast aggregators. Search for us, or tap on the links below on your mobile device. If you want us to add another aggregator leave a comment below...
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Are mechanical hard drives dead?

The other day I was shopping and I ran across a 512GB solid state drive from a reputable manufacturer for about $50. The part of me that still thinks in 1985 terms was utterly totally floored. Back then, there was only about 512GB of data stored on the entire planet! What’s more, a ONE MEGABYTE hard drive was $1,000 in those days. With a little time spent on a calculator, I can figure out that I would have paid roughly $1.527 BILLION for that amount of storage back then, and it would have been in the form of large, clunky, mechanical hard drives. This is a silent, stable, memory stick that not only has no moving parts but is about the size of a postage stamp. Let’s back up a second. Mechanical hard drives Wikipedia tells me that the...
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What is a feed horn?

I gotta tell you… I’ve been running this blog for a long time and yet I don’t think I’ll ever run out of funny-sounding terms to define. Some of them sound so improbable that you have to wonder. Like, “feed horn.” I’m not sure what you came into this article thinking a “feed horn” is, but it’s a fun-sounding word that can conjure up all sorts of images. In truth, it’s really not that exciting. It is, however, an important part of a satellite dish. In order to understand a feed horn, you have to understand how a satellite dish works. It’s just a way to focus signals. A satellite dish is an antenna that’s designed to pick up very, very, very high frequencies. There are two really distinguishing things about satellite transmissions...
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HEY BAR OWNERS: Do you know who your DIRECTV rep is?

Do you own or manage a bar or restaurant? If you do, you probably know this: You probably subscribe to DIRECTV for your bar. DIRECTV is still the only way to get NFL Sunday Ticket in a commercial setting. DIRECTV equipment is incredibly reliable, lasting years and years. If you’re like most bar and restaurant operators, you put in DIRECTV service a while ago. It might have been 25 or more years ago, and you might even still be using the same equipment from your HD upgrade in the late 2000s. After all, if it ain’t broke, right? Here are two more facts you need to consider I just gave you a list of three very positive things. But, there’s another side to this, and it’s worth pointing out these two things: The number of DIRECTV...
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Is a cloud DVR better than a regular DVR?

Think back to those days back in the 2000s. Back then, you might have been an “early adopter.” You had a DVR and that’s where the stuff you wanted to watch sat. You had total control — you set up the recordings and you deleted them. Then, on demand came. In a sense, on-demand is kind of like a cloud DVR. It stores stuff you want to watch plus a whole lot more. Some people jumped on it right away and stopped worrying so much about the DVR. A few years later, streaming video really hit big. That wasn’t so long ago, right? I mean it wasn’t that long ago that a lot of people still had to deal with buffering and low quality when they wanted to stream. It seems like the best of all words came with DIRECTV’s and Sling TV’s Cloud DVR. Let me...
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Will Gen Z save over-the-air television?

As humans, we’re hard-wired to classify things. It not only feels satisfying to put something in a particular “bracket,” it was the difference between life and death for our long-dead ancestors whose lives depended on quick decisions. It’s that need to classify that makes us think that every 15 years or so, there’s a new “generation” of people. You don’t need me to tell you this. You might be a boomer, born between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s. You might (but statistically aren’t) a Generation-Xer, born between the mid 1960s and about 1980. And so on, and so forth, through millennials and now the newest group to influence the world: Generation Z. Gen Zers, according to the traditional definition, were born between the mid-1990s and...
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How to reset your Genie 2

The DIRECTV Genie 2 server is very reliable. It’s going to be very rare that you need to reboot it. Still, it is a computer, and no matter how reliable there are going to be cases when it’s necessary. Unlike older DIRECTV hardware, you can’t access the Genie 2 directly, since it has no video output. So, you’ll need another way. This tutorial will show you how to reboot your HS17 Genie 2. If the Genie clients still work If you can use your remote to control a Genie client, then you can use the client to send a remote command to the Genie 2 server. Here are the steps: While watching live TV, press the MENU button. Press the left arrow until “What’s On Now” is highlighted. Press the down arrow until “Settings” is highlighted. Press...
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