Can you split Digital Cable for TV and Modem? (1 Viewer)

[MichaelG]

Here is the situation...

My roomate and I have Warner digital cable that has outlets in the living room and each bedroom. In my bedroom I just connect the cable into my VCR and it tunes channels fine. I also have antenna out connector no the VCR going to my ATI video card antenna in. This all works fine and I can tune channels with both.

In my roomates bedroom we have the cable modem connected, that goes into a hub and both our computers are connected to the hub. That all works fine. He just got a TV tuner card from his brother and wanted to use it on his computer. If he connects the cable to only his tuner card it tunes in channels fine, but when he connected a splitter to that cable and sends it to the modem and the tuner card it doesn't work.

I don't exactly remember if the internet accesibility works fine and the tuner doesn't, or if the tuner works fine and the internet doesn't. I thought that I remember reading something about this before but I couldn't remember if there is a solution. Since the analog and digital signales are being transmitted over the same wire I am sure that something gets screwed up if you try to use both? Is there a special splitter that is needed to split this cable connection.

If you know anything about this please post, thanks.

 

[SteveA]

Make sure you use splitters that are rated 5-1000 MHz. Also, the signal splitting should be kept to a minimum or the signal level will fall below the threshold needed by the cable modem and digital tuner. Avoid splitting the signal more than once for these devices.

 

[MikeAlletto]

The signal is already getting split once just to go to your 2 drops. My apartment has jacks in every room, some rooms have 2. There is a huge splitter in the master bedrooms closet with the 1 line coming in and all the splits going off of it.

 

[MichaelG]

Yeah the signal must be split 4 ways in my townhouse because we have access from 4 different rooms. In any room we can use either the digital, or the analog but apparently not both. I understand that we don't want to split the signal too much, but it was already that way when I got there and analog cable looks fine in my room.

Are you saying that buying a splitter rated at 5-1000 MHz will solve the problem? Seems to me that there is another issue here, like the digital signal having termination problems when used with the analog TV tuner.

 

[KevinW]

I'm a Roadrunner installer for Time Warner and splitting the signal too much can cause the modem to drop out. Here in Mississippi, we use the motorola surfboards. They have a signal range of -15 to +15 on channel 88, which is the download channel. Also, the minimum signal strength on channel 2, which is the upload channel, is around a +1.5. So, if the 2-way splitter is causing the signal to drop below these limits it won't work correctly.