Would digital cable overcome poor signal strenght from splices? (1 Viewer)

[Frank@N]

My 10 year old house has standard coax cable which the previous owner spliced the heck out of to avoid having to pay for multiple 'on' lines (something cable companies used to charge for apparently).

I could try to reverse the damage but it would involve crawling through all areas of the house and attic (I'd rather not).

Cable reception is still mostly OK despite the damage, but I had the house checked for data access and the Tech just laughed.

Since digital cable is all or nothing (?), it might be less susceptible to splices; whereas with analog you lose a bit more strength with every cable length and cut.

Would digital cable overcome poor signal strength from splices?

 

[adamKI]

Digital cable isn't all or nothing. Data is still sent over individual channels although through MPEG compression the bandwidth of a 6 MHz analog channel can carry up to 10 digital channels (both systems use the same frequency band ~50-850MHz). An idividual digital cable channel will be recieved in an all or nothing fashion - sort of ... you'd probably get dropouts and pixelation rather than old-fashioned snow.

So, if your current analog cable looks like crap, you're probably going to have problems with at least some of your digital channels. You're probably better off getting rid of some of the splices or at least terminating the unused branches (you can get f-connector terminators at RadioShack).

Good luck.