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 Post subject: Help with crappy digital cable signal
PostPosted: Sat 11-10-2007 12:29AM 
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Okay, so my house has some pretty old coax wiring. The cable comes into the house and is immediately split. One side to cable modem (which gets advertised speeds), and the other goes to be split several more times. I don't know how many times it's split before it reaches the digital cable box and HDTV, but the picture looks like absolute crap by then.

So here's the solution I have in my head: instead of splitting that second line, run it straight to the digital cable box, and split it after it reaches the HDTV. However, the only problem I see with this is that it is a long distance from where the cable comes into the house to the HDTV (I'm guessing I'd need about 100' of cable).

That brings me to my other option: a cable booster. Instead of making the wire go straight to the HDTV, throw a decent signal booster in there somewhere and hope it works its magic. However, I have no experience with these and don't know if a booster would be effectively killed by the frequent splitting.

All in all, there is one cable modem and five TVs that need cable. However, the HDTV's picture is the only one I really care about.

Danke!

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PostPosted: Sat 11-10-2007 1:35AM 
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Back at my parents house, when the geniuses from Charter came out to install digital cable, they decided that there was no need to amplify the signal going to the boxes, resulting in a couple of the boxes not being able to receive half of the movie channels like HBO and such or video on demand.

I went downstairs to take a look, they had a line coming in to the house, and that line was split off. One went into an amplifier/booster and up to the cable modem, and the other split was split a million other times off to the digital cable boxes. I just rewired it so the amp was before the initial splitter, and all boxes are able to receive all channels, and we're still getting our 5mbps down on the cable modem.

So yeah, a booster should do, even with a lot of splitting. The idea of a booster is to, well, boost the signal, but boost it enough so that it can be split several times and the signal will still remain at or above an acceptable level. But just make sure to put the booster before the split. If you put it after the splits, you're just boosting a low quality signal that's full of noise and only making it even crappier.

BTW, length of cable really won't matter. Signals on coax can haul ass and easily cover your house several times over. If I were you, I would just put a booster right on the line where it comes in and then split that boosted signal. Don't worry about a cable being long.

And one more thing....when buying an amp, make sure to get a bidirectional one, otherwise the cable modem and digital cable boxes won't be able to send any data back.


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PostPosted: Sat 11-10-2007 9:07AM 
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All right, thanks a ton!

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