In earlier posts I talked about using a TV antenna instead of subscribing to TV service like cable or satellite. The reception has been good, but on occasion because of weather I lose channels.
When the antenna receives the signal it will gradually degrade while it travels through the cable, especially when it goes through a splitter to multiple TVs. There are 2 different ways to remedy this. You can purchase a signal amplifier that will take a week signal and boost it up again, or you can get a preamp. A preamp is mounted close the the antenna and it takes the fresh signal and boosts it so the signal is strong enough to travel through all of the wires and splitters that you might have set up.
The preamp that I purchased provides a power of 17 dB VHF and 19 dB UHF. In order to figure out how much power I needed I followed the chart below. I figured the signal loss over the length of the wire and the signal lossed by the number of splitters that you have. Then purchase a preamp that is about 5-10 dB more than you need.
AVERAGE LOSS PER 100 FEET OF RG6 COAX CABLE IS 5 dB
2 way splitter 3.7 db
3 way splitter 7.5 db
4 way splitter 7.5 db
6 way splitter 13 db
8 way splitter 13.5 db
After installing the preamp my signal is strong at all of my TVs.
