Originally Posted By: Dignan
This evening I decided to install the coax permanently, but I need a little more length so I used my own cable that I use for work. It's a quad-shield RG6 cable, and seems higher quality than the 40' cable that came with the antenna. I'd estimate that I ran about 60' of my cable.

But I've lost channels.

The antenna comes with a required in-line amplifier which I've been attaching to both lines in my tests.

So what's going on here? Is my cable bad somehow? What should I do?


The 60' feet of RG6 is losing you between 4dB and 5dB of signal: more than half of the original signal is being lost (every 3dB lost is a halving of the signal).

Now the inline amplifier you have, should be mounted at the ANTENNA end of that coax. If you haven't already put it there, do so now and test again.

But most likely the in-line amp is hurting rather than helping. Freebie amps tend to have very VERY high "noise figures", in the 5dB to 7dB range. So that by itself is costing more than half the signal

The rule of thumb for signal amplifiers, is that all that matters in most situations is the noise figure of the very first transistor in the chain. So if your HDHomeRun tuner has, say, a noise figure of 2dB (very likely) on it's internal preamplifier, then anything worse than that in the chain is hurting rather than helping.

I tell my friends to look for an inline pre-amp with a noise figure (NF) under 2dB, or preferably under 1dB. The preamps I use here have a 0.4dB NF. That brand/model is no longer on the market, but several people have acquired ones from http://kitztech.com/ on my recommendation and those seem to work almost as well.

Also, try and minimize coax length and the number of connectors between the pre-amp and the antenna (try for under 3 feet). Because that's the area which the pre-amp cannot help with. Each connector is costing you up to 1dB of signal. Once the signal gets to a (good) pre-amp, the rest of the coax and connectors won't matter.

Cheers