The phrase "cable signals" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to signals transmitted through cable television or telecommunications systems.
Example: "The technician was able to restore the cable signals after the storm caused an outage."
Alternatives: "cable transmissions" or "cable broadcasts".
But in the four years since encrypting cable signals became legal, almost everything about TV consumption has changed.
Nobody else can listen in but the set picks up cable signals and radio voices from all over the world.
At present, almost every US household that wants to descramble digital cable signals and send them to the television needs one of those boxes.
Whether as separate machines or as part of set-top boxes decoding satellite, terrestrial or cable signals, the new generation of digital video-recorders do not use tape.
When amplified by line-doubling circuitry (which tries to endow normal TV with high resolution), weak cable signals can display shimmering dots and stair-stepped diagonal lines, as if you are watching through a sheet of mosquito netting.
"Nobody should hijack the power of journalism or use the public airwaves (or cable signals) simply to settle personal scores," Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that supports journalism education, said in an e-mail message.
Packets destined for your machine are sent, along with everyone else's in your area, with the cable signal.
Now that the cable signal might be divided among several TV's, VCR's, digital video recorders, set-top boxes and the like, an amplifier is often needed before the signal is strong enough to go around.
Even though his cable signal blipped out in the second half of Saturday's match, a relaxed and rested Jolley watched the MetroStars game, at least some of it, on television over the weekend.
When more than a decade ago he moved into his previous home, in Coldwater Canyon, only to learn he could not pick up a cable signal, he dispatched a production assistant to Phoenix to get something not yet available on the West Coast: DirecTV.
Then after all was said and done, the TV turned on, with a cable signal, but no TiVo at first.
