Cable Amplifier Recommendation

[RealCodeGuy]

Can anyone recommend a good cable amplifier? When I split the cable going to my Ceton card I always have signal problems. I would like to add another Ceton tuner but need to split the cable without losing signal. Thanks.

[Crash2009]

Split the signal at the amp. Get rid of all the splitters. All my signal problems disapeared after installing a BDA-S4 . I got mine at Amazon.

[barnabas1969]

My cable company installed my amplifier free of charge. I've replied to several threads regarding amplifiers in the past year, and everyone wants to spend their own money to buy one for some reason. Start with your cable company... they might do it for free.

[STC]

Start with your cable company... they might do it for free.

And do it right (hopefully).

[barnabas1969]

Start with your cable company... they might do it for free.

And do it right (hopefully).

Yeah, the thing I learned recently is that they may scan for signal strength/quality, but they may not check a range of frequencies when they do... and they rarely look at the return signal for your cable modem and tuning adapter. When I had the cable company out recently, I insisted that they check a range of frequencies to make sure that they were all balanced, and i also insisted that they look at the return (up-stream) signal from my cable modem and tuning adapter. If there is a problem with the return signal, you'll have problems tuning channels that use SDV.

What I learned is that the return channel signal strength on both the modem and the TA need to be less than 50dBmV, and higher than 25dBmV. I got a whole team of techs out to the house, and they all agreed that the "sweet spot" for the return signal was about 40dBmV.

Amplifiers, splitters, and bad cables/connections can all cause the modem and TA to increase the signal strength. They increase the transmit power until they can communicate successfully with the cable plant. If there is too much interference from OTA signals leaking into the cables, loose/dirty/wet/corroded connections, or too many splitters/amplifiers in the up-stream path, you can have problems... sometimes intermittently.

[barnabas1969]

Oh, and another thing I learned... Brighthouse uses sub-contractors for a lot of their work. Those subs don't always have the best tools. Apparently, the Brighthouse employees carry a scanner that costs almost $10K, and Brighthouse pays for it. The subs can't typically afford one, and Brighthouse won't buy them for the sub-contractors, so they use a much less sophisticated scanner.

The guy who seemed to be the lead tech on the team they sent to my house (yeah, I screamed really loud until they sent people who actually knew what they were doing) had one of those really nice scanners. He checked all the frequencies, up-stream/down-stream, signal ingress, etc. He found several problems with my service and went as far as to replace the whole tap up on the pole. The tap is where all the houses near me are connected to the big cable line up on the pole. He found squirrel damage on the line that feeds my house too... and even went so far as to find a faulty cable in one of the kids' bedrooms that was causing some signal ingress.

Things are really working smooth now.

[RealCodeGuy]

Thanks for the tips!

[jziggity]

Definitely check out http://cabletvamps.com. I picked up the EDA-FT08300 awhile back. Yes, it is expensive, but was absolutely worth it in my mind. The cabletvamps.com site has a lot of great info on it too. By way of example, when the cable company tech guys (2 of them) originally came to my place to do the initial install a few years back, they couldn't get my main living room cable box to function right - the signal strength just wasn't there. Since I was literally not watching their every move, their solution was to pull my tap (a generic, non-amplified one at that point) out of the mix and connect the incoming feed to the house directly to the line going to my living room via a dual-female coupler. Look at that, now the living room cable box worked! I should sure hope so...

Of course, I didn't discover their $hitty-ass excuse for a "fix" until after they left, and boy was I HOT. I called the cable company up (Time Warner), bitched an ear-full, and got a supervisor out a couple of days later to do it right. The first 2 techs also did a $hit job on installing a wall jack - they didn't secure it to anything so it practically pulled right out of the wall.

The moral of the story is, sure the cable company might install an amplifier for free, but at what headache expense, and are they going to do it right? To this day, I will handle all of my internal cable wiring myself, including amplifiers, and there is no way in HELL a cable company tech is coming into my place with a drill, ever again.

The EDA-FT08300 works great, in my opinion. I still get the occasional very short pixelations in programming, maybe once or twice real quick in a 30 minute program, but I'm convinced it has nothing to do with my internal cable runs or amplifier inside my house, because I KNOW it was done right and with quality cabling, because I did it myself. Good luck!