Electronics people and cable TV

[limblips]

Came home to a dead TV and no internet. Troubleshot it for a bit and narrowed it down to a bad 4 way splitter. Changed it and bingo, internet and TV. In all my years of playing with this stuff this is the first time I have seen a splitter go bad. Anybody else ever seen one go bad?

 

[TPD]

Came home to a dead TV and no internet. Troubleshot it for a bit and narrowed it down to a bad 4 way splitter. Changed it and bingo, internet and TV. In all my years of playing with this stuff this is the first time I have seen a splitter go bad. Anybody else ever seen one go bad?

yup

 

[Ken King]

Anybody else ever seen one go bad?

Yep, the contacts can corrode over time and given with a 4-way you are reducing the input signal by about 7 db (25% of original signal at each output port) it doesn't take much more loss to make them crap out.

 

[Grumpy]

^yeahthat

 

[TPD]

See wh

Care to elaborate on that?

see what Ken said. My issue as well.

 

[DoWhat]

Came home to a dead TV and no internet. Troubleshot it for a bit and narrowed it down to a bad 4 way splitter. Changed it and bingo, internet and TV. In all my years of playing with this stuff this is the first time I have seen a splitter go bad. Anybody else ever seen one go bad?

I sucks to trouble shoot.
How long did it take?

 

[RoseRed]

I sucks to trouble shoot.
How long did it take?

 

[DoWhat]

?

 

[Ken King]

I sucks to trouble shoot.

Not me.

 

[DoWhat]

Not me.

Oops.
It sucks to trouble shoot a gripe like that.
Time consuming.

 

[Ken King]

It sucks to trouble shoot a gripe like that.
Time consuming.

All in how you approach it. First step when dealing with something like that is to take a section of cable and just use a single coupler to run it to one device from the main feed. If that works culprit found.

 

[limblips]

I sucks to trouble shoot.
How long did it take?

About 2 hours. I did what Ken King said. I wanted to first verify I had service from the pole so I hooked a spare piece of cable directly to the main feed and the cable box. It worked so I eliminated the feed. Next I fed each leg off the splitter directly one at a time to verify the individual cables. All checked good so all indications were the splitter but I was doubting because I had never seen one go bad but went and bought one anyway. I was really happy when it worked because the next step was going in to the crawl space and my fat butt barely fits down there.

 

[Grumpy]

Had that issue long time ago and had a tech check things out, his advice was ALWAYS buy a quality splitter. He said most problems inside a house are due to cheap splitters or too many splitters.

 

[PeoplesElbow]

I'm not sure of the frequency range of digital cable but I'd recommend a powered distribution amp if splitting it more than three ways.

It also helps if your house has RG-6 instead of RG-59 and use high quality compression fittings.

 

[limblips]

I'm not sure of the frequency range of digital cable but I'd recommend a powered distribution amp if splitting it more than three ways.

It also helps if your house has RG-6 instead of RG-59 and use high quality compression fittings.

RG-6 throughout. The splitter was from my Direct TV experiment which was a very dismal failure.

 

[PeoplesElbow]

RG-6 throughout. The splitter was from my Direct TV experiment which was a very dismal failure.

Stay away from those shiddy twist on connectors too. The only ones worth having are the compression fittings that require a tool.