<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><blockquote type="cite"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="gmail_quote"><div><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">Be careful here,
I bought a power splitter and it actually caused the
loss of some channels.<br>
One of which my wife likes to watch.<br>
I had to pay to have the CCo come out and raise the
power enough to overcome the passive splitter
losses.<br>
Needless to say, this did not make me a bigger fan
of the CCo.<br>
<br>
There seems to me some wonderful and creative
engineering going on here.<br>
Some of the main channels are very fussy about the
plumbing downstream from the cable while <br>
the junk channels would probably be OK using old
speaker wire.<br>
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<div> My TV provider is Comcast, if that makes a
difference.<br>
<br>
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<div>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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<div>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.</div>
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<br>
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?<br>
<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Those numbers look pretty good. On my current channel I am seeing -3.8 dBmV and a 34.3 SNR and have no dropouts that I've noticed.</div><div><br></div><div>Now if you split it two ways, your signal strength will drop another 3.5 dB... so you will probably be at -5 or -6 dBmV. The standard says a tuner is supposed to work with a signal as high as 16dBmV and as weak as -12dBmV; 0dBmV is nominal. Of course all tuners are different.</div>
<div><br></div><div>If you split the line 3 ways, one leg will have a 3.5dB loss and the other two will have a 7dB loss... pushing you pretty close to the bottom end. The best I can say is to try it... keeping in mind that the SNR is more important than the strength. A SNR of 35dB means that the signal is about 1000x greater than the noise level (on average)... adding splitters shouldn't raise the noise level on the line much if at all.... as the noise is being reduced by the same level as the signal. However you will likely see SNR increase because you have more devices connected, more cable, and more connections... all of which can act as an antenna or otherwise inject noise into the signal; additionally, all tuners have built in amplifier that will add noise when trying to boost weaker signals to usable levels... this amplification stage is largely what dictates the quality of a tuner.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Note not all channels will have the same SNR. For example my 4G LTE Verizon phone will completely kill the SNR of some of the channels on my HDHR prime if it's transmitting too close to it. I've had to keep my phone as far away from it as I can because of the amount of noise it generates in those frequencies.</div>
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