Cable TV Scanning
2 TV's, one in living room and one in bedroom. Scan the living room TV on cable an it pick's up all 50 channels on the park cable system. (Optel) When I scan the bedroom TV on cable it will not pic...
Forum Discussion
FlatBroke wrote:
Can’t you put those termination caps on the used splitter terminals and have it work?
Flat broke,
Termination caps in this case will not help.
Termination caps at one point of time would have been used to stop "reflections" of signals back to the other sets. But that was when all broadcasts were analog and those reflections sometimes would be strong enough to show up as a light offset "Ghost" in the video since the reflection was delayed.
Nothing special about termination caps, they are a 75 ohm resistor..
Digital broadcasts seem to be able to cope with some reflections to a certain extent.
The thing is, with digital the TV tuner must have PLENTY of signal to overcome the noise around the antenna or in the antenna path to work correctly.
My experiences with analog and digital TV tells me that unless you are right under the TV broadcast tower, that you NEED to eliminate as much of the loss in your antenna path/system as possible..
That pretty much means ALL passive splitters must go.. The problem with that is many RVs (and this applies to sticks and bricks) will have two or more TVs and a three or 4 way passive splitter..
With a 3 or 4 way splitter, you may as well just stick a 6ft piece of wire in the antenna input, you loose that much signal.
To get ALL TVs back into working order you will want a AMPLIFIED COUPLER which is a fancy way of saying a splitter with a low gain preamp for each output.. This way each output now has some signal gain over the noise level.
I ran into this during the analog to digital transition, I had a eight port passive splitter on my sticks and bricks to feed my whole home MATV system..
Once channels started moving to digital, I lost them.. I found for the most part I was too far from the stations to reliably get the digital channels with what used to work fine with analog broadcasts.
I resorted to buying a $180 amplified coupler and that restored all of my locals and only a couple of the far distant channels..
My locals are a min of 50-60 miles from me.. My far distant channels (across state lines) are 80-100 miles (I used to get analog channels up to 120miles away).
