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Is there a way to test an in place coaxial cable ?

It provides cable service to 3 different rooms and some of the channels in one room are fuzzy.

I tried another TV set with the same results.

thanks.

Quote from: Magnum on March 07, 2011, 05:10:53 PM
Is there a way to test an in place coaxial cable ?

It provides cable service to 3 different rooms and some of the channels in one room are fuzzy.

I tried another TV set with the same results.

Having crappy reception is a pretty good metric, absent some expensive equipment to hand.

You could use a RF network analyzer or spectrum analyzer if you have one handy. Or a cheaper ($400-500) Signal Strength Meter. I'll assume you don't, in which case you might look to see if you know any friendly cable/satellite installers.

If someone drove a nail/staple through it, I think it would look uniformly bad and you could measure a short if you disconnected the equipment and the primary feed. The biggest problem I've seen at my house is some crappy RG59, pink coloured, no brand name, 1970's junk, which is stapled in place crushing the cable in places. Thankfully it's a ranch style house, and I can get to a lot of it in the basement.

If you know the specific channels, you could look up their frequency and see if they exceed the bandwidth of the installed cabling. You could also check if there is different signal loss at each of your endpoints, and how the signal is split. Some cable boxes have a diagnostic page that displays signal strength, though it sounds like you're just using analogue TV's with the cable system providing the analogue conversion/rebroadcast for the now digital TV stations.

You might just want to get the cable guy out, and figure out who owns the cabling, it could be the apartment owners, but in town here I know a couple of buildings where the cable/sat companies did the install. Consider also how they might replace the cable(s), one of my old apartments had it slung in the basement and crawl space. If you have to tear it out of the wall that might not be a popular solution, and snaking some RG6 cable along the floor might look more appealing.

use a little simple logic, as well
if the cable for that room is considerably longer than the others, then it makes sense that the signal will not be as strong
cable length attenuates the signal, moreso at higher frequencies

The cable length is the longest at that run.

I think I will do an experiment.

I will hook up the same TV at the second room.

If the picture is good, then it would have to be a bad or weak cable.

Andy