Calling tech gurus

[BrokeEnthusiast]

I have a question for someone smarter than me... I just moved into a house and am having issues with the cable. 

 

There is one cable that comes into the garage into the smart box where it has a splitter.  From this the cable goes into the living room and master bedroom, that's it.  I have a HD box in the living room and a splitter there that I connect my internet router too.  In the master bedroom I have a small digital transceiver, I think they call it a DTA?  Here is the funny thing.  I essentially have three connections; router, cable box and digital transceiver.  If I have all three set up in the above configuration I get TV on my HD box and my internet but I get an error message on the DTA in my bedroom TV that says "We have detected interruption in your service."  If I take the splitter off the living room and have the cable go straight to the HD box and no router both the HDTV in living room and the DTA in bedroom work.  If I place the router in the master bedroom with a splitter I get TV on both but no internet.  I know the wire to the bedroom is good, I just paid to have that one run.

 

Does anyone have ideas on how to do this?  Right now I am just running the apple TV off my bedroom TV so I can have the HD box and internet.

[Dolomite_supafly]

Buy a new splitter.

[E4 No More]

Yes, buy a new splitter and make sure all connections are tight. The more splitters you use the weaker the signal, but you aren't doing anything excessive. That is normally a problem in apartments.

[dralarms]

More important. Get the right splitter. You may need a specific one.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Passive splitters lose at minimum -3 dB for each 2 way split, and maybe -6 dB or more. The loss is both from natural diluting of the signal, and also rather significant losses at every connector in the system.

 

If the signal is not hot enough, it quits working because it is too weak to be detected by the boxes. Some feeds into a house from the cable company are fairly hot, and some are weak/marginal right from the pole into the house.

 

Get a cable repairman to come out and check/fix the signal level coming into the house, and get him to debug the house cable wiring. The cable company will warn that getting the repairman to work on your indoor wiring might incur extra service charge, and it may be that you would pay an extra charge, or maybe not.

 

The trick-- The phone support and front office folks can be ignorant, uncaring jerks, but phone company and cable field service techs seem to be standup, fabulous folks. I've NEVER had a bad experience with service techs who came to the house, but talking to the office folks always makes me mad enough to spit.

 

From my experience, the service tech will be eager to please and have a happy customer, will get your system working, and try as best he can to avoid extra charges to your account. He may be able to get you a hotter signal climbing the pole or even running you new cable, or giving you free "company approved" splitters, or even installing a free "company approved" signal booster. All those have happened to me in the past anyway. If the office people were as nice as the service techs, it would be a much better world.

 

Radio Shack, best buy, even home depot sell the splitters, connectors, boosters, etc. But the service techs have little respect for such items, and prefer to install the items they have in their truck. And the odds are the ones off the truck might turn out to be "free" if the serviceman can reconcile his work report the right way.

Edited February 27, 2014 by Lester Weevils

[Dustbuster]

I just rcvd a digital something box from. Comcrap for a tv in our office. It looks more like an amp than anything else of course we don't accept any outside electronics at work without testing em first for exploits...my guess is they're upgrading or changing something in the dtv signal that needs that box to work. As someone said u may have signal loss agreed, also need to make sure u get the proper splitter that will handle the frequency of the tv signal
HTH


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2 of course it ate my spelling.