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Amplifying HDTV signal, advise needed.

N

n8236

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 1, 2006
1,065
32
Hello,

I have five TVs outfitted with Comcast digital boxes and one of them is not receiving all its channels. The fifth TV is furthest away from source (12-15 meters) with a cable length possibly over 50 ft. I highly suspect the missing channels are due to a weak signal. I already have a HDTV amp, but it appears to not provide enough juice.

The question is this, can I simply add another amp to raise the db to fix this problem?
 
Adding another amp will over power the system causing other issues. Call Comcast, HD takes a lot of bandwidth, the problem might be too many TV's.
 
TV attenuation is a weird and wonderful thing. You can actually have too much signal...Believe it or not, sometimes REMOVINd a booster, or using a passive instead of a powered amp can get you better results.
 
Macman45 said:
TV attenuation is a weird and wonderful thing. You can actually have too much signal...Believe it or not, sometimes REMOVINd a booster, or using a passive instead of a powered amp can get you better results.
Click to expand...
Digital makes it even weirder, analog was easy to diagnose but digital ads a whole new set of quirks.

Also curious if cable internet is installed and if there is a signal tap somewhere on the line.
 
Not sure what a passive amp is, but I'll have to look into it.

The current amp I have does have a knob for dialing down the db gain, so if I do get another amp and over boost my signal, I can adjust it.

========================

My current setup is the following:

Input line > 2-way splitter > 2-way splitter > 4 output amp

On the first 2-way splitter, one goes to 2nd 2-way splitter and other to cable internet.

On the second splitter, one goes to of my TVs and other to input of amp.

On amp's four outputs, it goes to all TVs.

==========================

Here's the no no. I found out the line going between the troubled TV and amp has a 2-way splitter (with one output going to nowhere, which I have terminated. The termination actually helped gain back some of the lost channels, but not all.

Does terminating an output provide back a full or partial signal loss?

Is it a better idea to just buy a female-to-female connector and replace the 2-way splitter? Will that gain back some signal?
 
Turns out, the troubled tv had three problems.

1. It was a ****** digital box from Crapcast
2. Weak signal, which required a booster
3. A semi-working cable
 
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