Surprise result: cable signal too high!

[Yooper]

I put together my original SageTV system about two years ago. At that time I had optimized my system so that the SageTV picture quality was better than what could be viewed directly from the cable on my TV. This is analog TV from the cable provider.

In the past few months I noticed that my picture quality thru SageTV had diminished - with diagonal streaks across the screen. Eventually, it got so worse that I started viewing cable TV directly on the TV.

About 2 weeks ago my hard drive crashed and I had to start from scratch. I decided to investigate the quality issue in the SageTV system. At first, I thought I needed to boost the signal with an amplifier. Doing this made the signal worse.

I then decided to go the other way and attenuate the signal via splitters. The signal got better! I kept adding splitters until I got an excellent picture. Unbelievably, I needed to add about 15 db of splitters to do this!

It seems that my TV is able to handle the strong video signal directly from the cable - but the tuner cards in my SageTV system are not. These cards seem to work optimally over a narrow range of signal strength.

If others are having this same diagonal streaking behavior you might consider the approach I took.

[bhyman1]

Yep, sometimes too much signal is just as bad as too little.

Alternatively, instead of adding a bunch of splitters, there are things called "pads", they look like pass through coax barrels and have set values to reduce signal by a certain number of db's.