atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Coaxial Cable

Memory lane here .
My prior ISP installed a 2 way splitter.
One going to the tv's and one going to the cable modem.
However the one port was a passthu or 0 db and the port to the tv"s had like a 3db loss.
Problem was it kept failing and sometimes when they came out they did not have one to replace it..

What do you call that type of splitter?
I seem to recall it was not called a splitter.

It was not a powered device.

Will be crunching the numbers this evening. 3-way splitters are Philmore CS203NE and a 2-way splitter that Verizon includes with WIFI extenders.

Insertion and Return loss are frequency dependent.

Taking pictures of various hardware pieces along the way for archiving.

Those 3-ways are -7db all around. Any difference between 5 and 1000Mhz is not material. Just figure -7.

I'm giving this to you as a exercise more than anything so you can see how it's done. From what you are showing, you would be hard pressed to to have a 20db loss from ONT to any set, which is what would need to happen to be below the -10dbm threshold.

Incidentally, cable boxes have a huge amount of diagnostics built in and can display the signal levels coming in and going out (return). The cable company can access this feature remotely when you call with a problem. I don't know what cable box Verizon gives you so I can't say how to access this information. I do know that with the old SA boxes we have here it's something like holding down the volume up and down buttons on the front panel while pressing another. Then you get to scroll through a dozen pages or so. You might try Google with your box model.

-Hal

That's called a tap. The thru loss is as low as possible while the tap port can be had in many values. That one is kind of strange though, because when the tap port approaches 3db the thru loss winds up being 3db also. So that would really a 2-way splitter. Are you sure the port connected to the modem wasn't 10db with a 3db through? I've seen that done because the modem return signal is too hot.

You normally would use taps instead of splitters to equalize the levels from each one when they are spaced along a long line. Say you came off an amplifier with a level of +40dbm and you want to supply +10 to each house in a row of houses. Your first house would be supplied by a tap with a value of 30 (-30db on the tap port). Then the next maybe would be a 25, then 20 and so on. You calculate the tap value from the preceding tap thru level minus the cable attenuation to get you as close as possible to +10.

-Hal

Our new boxes are Arris. The older ones were Motorola.

I found the diagnostic menu, but most of the data fields are marked "N/A". I remember a similar screen with the Moto boxes and they always showed actual data.

Back to crunching numbers.

I crunched the numbers into a Microsoft Word document.

Some of the cable lengths were guesstimates (particularly the 2nd floor bedroom).

All connected devices...on paper anyway...are better than the -10db threshold.

Unfortunately, the Arris boxes don't show level readings.

As you can see a few feet +/- isn't going to break the bank. It was nice when they printed the length every foot on the cable jacket.

-Hal

Hal explained that last post very well

.I cabled my house with new RG6.

Home runs from attic to 5 rooms.

All identical cable.

Living room didn't like something?

Possibly the 1 ghz wall port snap in?

Re cabled living room.

Eventually ran RG11 from street to attic. Then from splitter in attic to living room installed more RG11

Seems still a discrepancy in living room only with older cable box and with my HDTV antenna.

Some TVs get more channels?

2 of the tvs are mounted 15' apart. Identical 2017 Samsung 65" HDTV

Go figure?

How hard was it to work with RG11?

I don't think that I've come across it before, and, the way I've seen it described, it reads like an extremely stiff/rigid cable.

When my church signed up for Comcast Internet, Comcast ran Hardline (~1.6 mm diameter) from a tap to an external demarc, and had me run Perfect Flex P6ET77VVWLD from the external box to the phone closet (aka my office).

Total distance was ~140'.

No, not at all. It's just a bigger RG-6. Same construction.

Actually PPC is owned by Belden.

See that cable you installed as well as the 11 series here

https://www.ppc-online.com/products/coaxial?Network=Premises

-Hal