Cable TV Technical Question

[TromboneAl]

I'm trying to debug a problem with our cable TV (the one I thought was resolved recently).

There's a problem I see with a particular channel on my TV. That problem is not present on my neighbor's TV. We are both connected to the same provider (Suddenlink). He has a relatively new TV.

My question is: Could his TV be using a different set of signals that are coming over the cable? That is, could his be decoding digital signals while mine is using the analog signals?

Thanks,

 

[ziggy29]

Do you both have the same set top box from the cable company? I would think the provider should be providing the same signals to both of you for the same stations.

Alternatively if there's no set top box and you have QAM tuners in the TV to pick up the cable signals, differences in the sets could account for it potentially.

 

[harley]

If it's coming over your cable, it should be digital. What kind of artifiacts are you seeing? Or is it something else? Sometimes it's as easy as tightening the coax connections, or maybe buying a signal amplifier. If you've got a number of splitters along the way you could be losing signal strength. The easiest way to test this is to hook the tv directly to the coax coming in from the street. Maybe you could borrow your neighbor's tv (if it's not too big) and see if the problem occurs on their tv in your house. Also, you might be able to bypass the cable box (depending on the tv and the channel) and see if the problem goes away that way. The tighter you can focus on the problem, the better chance you have of getting someone to look into it seriously.

 

[Leonidas]

Have you called the cable company help line? I had one channel that gave me fits with artifacts and a degrading picture until finally the box gave me an error message and froze up whenever I tuned to that channel. CS reps from the company can look at return data from your cable box and diagnose issues. In my case the original connections, done by a contractor, were poorly done. Repair guy took about 45 minutes and redid every connection inside and out - no problems since.

 

[TromboneAl]

See this thread for more:

http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f27/help-me-debug-cable-tv-problem-with-audio-42501.html

 

[OAG]

Wonder why the Mods do not merge these two threads? I am getting confused!