Crappy TV Picture

[McBain]

Not sure where this goes, so I'll plop it here.

Ok, we've got 6 tv's hooked up to cable in my house. Only on one tv in my basement does the signal look like bull-plop. Its only the basic channels though, the other channels(cable channels) look fine. So its gotta be getting intereferance from something. Is there something I can do like adding a signal amplifier, noise reducer., etc. Any experience with this? Suggestions? Comments?

[Armo]

get a 10 DB amplifiyer

everytime u have a spliter in your cable line you reduce the total DB of the cable signal by 3bd off each of the split, so if u got 10bd going into a 2 way split, it knocks bot down to 7db, and so on and so forth, the standard for the drop to you house is 0DB +/- 3db and lower than -3 db and you cant make the picture out, any more than +3db is really just extra, you can get a 10db amplifyer from radio shack for like $30

http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&category%5Fname=CTLG%5F003%5F010%5F001%5F000&product%5Fid=15%2D1170

you say the cable channels look fine, or the basic channles look fine?

[TheBaron]

what he said, we have at least 4 of those in my house. long stretches of cable also seem to require amplifiers

[Armo]

75ohm cable can run approx 100ft before u can tell a diff in the picture and thats if its not split

[McBain]

The cable channels look fine, its the basics....ya know....2, 4, 7, and such. Would I just need 1 amplifier? And where would I stick it? Right @ the the beginning of all the splitters or at the specific tv in question?

[Armo]

well the amp is primarily for boosting cable tv signals, i would suppose rabbit ears would make the local channles look better

[bothered]

The TVs are connected in parallel. You lose signal strength at every split, (the signal sees the TVs as reistors.) If you put the amp at the 'bad' TV all you do is amplify an already bad signal. The amp needs to go before the split.