DerekCV

co-ax on surge protector

Does anyone use the co-ax, or other various inputs, on a surge protector besides pluging 120 volt stuff?

Thanks.

Phil A

I don't but all I have is an antenna in the attic so I don't think it has a great chance of being struck by lightning. The purpose of those is to prevent a surge coming from the cable. What is your co-ax hooked to (e.g. cable, satellite, etc.)?

DerekCV

I have a digital cable box... soon to be HD

Dan J

I had it running through the surge protector (Monster) but the picture wasn't quite as clean as before so I removed it.

I talked to the cable guy recently whho said that my boxes (Scientific Atlanta 8300HD) had a built in surge protector. Is it as good? I dunno, and I hope to never find out.

Dan

Phil A

With many of the devices, I'm sure there is some small signal loss probably like 0.5db for going thru it. It is an easy decision in my case.

Bob McElfresh

One thing the coax connector on a surge protector does is tie the "shield" of the CATV coax to your power ground (the third prong on the power plug).

Sometimes - this solves hum that comes in on your CATV line (The CATV picks up 60 hz by running in parallel with power wires.)

But - it is a break in the signal path. If you were feeding a weak analog CATV signal through it - I would try to avoid the extra break. If the coax is bringing in a digital signal - it's a lot less likely to cause problems running through a power strip.