MC7forum wrote:ZPrime wrote:barnabas1969 wrote:You really should put the amp outside, right after the grounding block.
No power out there, so not an option unless I feed back a second cable to supply power, and then each individual cable for the house would have to be on a splitter inside, or I'd have to extend them all out to that location which is an extra 40-50 feet of distance. The ground point for the house is in a strange spot - it's easy to get the run from the pole to there, but then to feed into the house it has to go around the garage and all the way up the side.
Port 1 on your amp allows you to feed power into it, and get signal out of it. All you need is the power inserter that is often included with the amp when you buy it. If you don't have the power inserter, go to the following link:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sonora-Power-In ... 41739d2743
The amplifier needs to be as close to the point where the signal enters your house because that's where the signal is the cleanest. If you put it downstream, you will be amplifying any noise that has been picked up along the way. Please... just try what I suggested!
Please note that the latest set of levels were taken in the evening after the cable has cooled down so they read higher than they would during the day (which is when my original, somewhat marginal levels were taken).
The amp didn't come with a power inserter since it has a dedicated port for power as well. It came with a wall wart and that was it. I do see after looking at the label that port 1 can also accept power... but please continue reading.
I don't want to put the 8-way amp out into "weather" which is what happens if I mount it outside. I'd have 7 ports that I have to cap off if I do that. I'm looking at picking up a single port adjustable-gain PCT amp from Amazon ($22) and giving that a shot though, to help boost the signal at my wiring area.
There's also the issue of our dog, who could at any time decide to chew the coax. It is currently fine, as I've inspected it, but I don't like the idea of having additional voltage on it that could hurt her. She has already chewed the A/C control wire once when she was frustrated at being unable to reach a chipmunk that hid under the A/C condenser fan...
Signal seems to be irrelevant anyway, because the HDHR Prime works fine (even with the current overdriven state). I put in the Prime over the weekend and while I did see one or two small instances of macroblocking, they were about as frequent as what I get from the normal TWC boxes and are tolerable - sound didn't drop out at all which is the big annoyance with the infiniTV. At least one of them was "in the stream" (i.e. I could rewind live TV and replay it), so it may not have even been the tuner's fault. The TA is showing 5 retrans now though, so I'm still going to keep messing with cabling / signal. Possibly the retrans are from the signal being too hot at this point... It's also worth noting that the TWC boxes occasionally have SDV problems - I'll sometimes have to hit "retry" a couple times before they will pick up an SDV channel - this might happen once every few weeks and it seems to happen "For a while" on multiple channels and then go away. I've always written it off to their equipment.
Tuning definitely seems quicker as well. I don't sleep the WMC system, but with the Eth6 every time I'd fire up an extender to watch TV I would get the blue circle for 10-20 seconds or so and it would deadlock the UI. Not seeing that now with the Prime (or maybe it's 1-2 seconds, not enough to be that annoying). I almost never watch from the WMC system itself; it's connected to a TV, but the vast majority of TV viewing happens in a different room so most of my experience is via 360 Extender.
Please note: while my handle is "ZPrime" I definitely have no affiliation with SiliconDust.
Again, I would still
prefer to be using the Ceton product because it means I pay TWC $2.50 for a single CC instead of needing to pay for two of them at $5... but the Eth6 just doesn't work as it should.
