[mythtv-users] Good signal strength? was: Re: Alternative to Silicondust HDHR3-6CC-2X3?

[David Litchman]

On 9/6/2012 2:49 PM, Joseph Fry wrote:
>
>         Be careful here, I bought a power splitter and it actually
>         caused the loss of some channels.
>         One of which my wife likes to watch.
>         I had to pay to have the CCo come out and raise the power
>         enough to overcome the passive splitter losses.
>         Needless to say, this did not make me a bigger fan of the CCo.
>
>         There seems to me some wonderful and creative engineering
>         going on here.
>         Some of the main channels are very fussy about the plumbing
>         downstream from the cable while
>         the junk channels would probably be OK using old speaker wire.
>>           My TV provider is Comcast, if that makes a difference.
>>
>>
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>
>     I bought an amplified splitter off eBay. I have a 2-way passive
>     splitter at the ingress, with one cable going to the modem and the
>     other the amplified splitter. From there all my runs go direct to
>     their respective devices, including my HDHR prime. It works quite
>     well for my home setup. When I get home I can post the
>     manufacturer and model of the splitter, if anybody cares.
>
>     In a perfect world the only cables going to my TVs would be
>     Ethernet, but the tech isn't quite there yet, and with my penchant
>     for watching live TV combined with the copy-protection flag crap
>     that so many channels use, it may never happen.
>
> Putting the amp at "the ingress" is the safest place to put one... 
> using it further down the line, after having already reduced the 
> signal with splitters and long cable runs, will often result in 
> reduced signal QUALITY, which is far more important than signal 
> strength.   Obviously if your signal coming in is very strong to begin 
> with, you may get away with it, but typically the cable companies only 
> put out a signal strong enough to go through 7-10 dB worth of loss, 
> which will occur with a 4 way split and a long cable run.  Amplifying 
> the signal after a 7dB drop will likely result in a high strength but 
> poor quality signal... at least in my experience.

Looking at my existing InfiniTV PCIe, the signal strength for all four 
tuners varies from about -4 dBmV to -5 dBmV while idle, and around -2 to 
-3 dBmV while playing a channel with right around 35 dB signal to noise 
level.  Is that good?  Bad?  Indifferent?  Am I likely to run into any 
problems if I split it two, possibly three ways?


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