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I'm trying to diagnose an issue where my TV reports no terrestrial digital signal.

Some background. I've been doing a lot of home renovation and general improvement to my house over the last few years, as part of the changes I've been running new shielded coaxial cables from my loft to each room. I've not been terminating these cables and have left the original coax cables connected while I work through each room with the intent that once all be cables were run I'd be able to buy a new splitter for them all which could live in my loft to replace the multiple splitters mounted on the aerial mast. The idea being a single indoor splitter is better than many on the mast.

Well, the day finally came and I bought a labgear LDA2061LR 6way distribution amplifier, disconnected all the equipment mounted to the aerial mast and ran a single cable from the aerial receiver to the labgear and connected my lounge coax and voila, no signal.

So, there's the background. I'll try to be as detailed as possible about what set-ups and tests I've run already... Please be aware that I'm no more than an enthusiastic diy-er with some experience with cable termination and testing.

Original and attempted setups

Original and attempted setups

Notes about diagram

  • A new cable was run from outside to inside the loft, this was tested during the new equipment test
  • I've also tested the original setup again, but with some of the dangling coax disconnected from the wolsey. Still didn't work
  • There will eventually be more outputs connected to the new labgear but for now just getting one working would be a good start

Things tested:

  1. voltage tested coming out of both Labgears and at end of coax connected to Wolsey was 12v
  2. multimeter testing of all parts of coax checking for cable breaks, there were none (after terminating some f-types)
  3. adjusting the dB dial on the Wolsey slowly from 12 to 25dB

That's it, even with the above testing and all the combinations I've yet to see any digital signal on my TV. It's worth noting that combination 4 is the same as the original setup!

If anyone out there has any insight into what might be wrong or any other tests or combinations I can try please let me know. If I've inadvertantly blown something by connecting things together that shouldn't have been, I'd like to know that too. I totally get that I'm an amateur and one option is to get a professional in to sort out the problem but I'd really like to understand why even the original setup isn't working the way it was.

Thanks in advance.

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  • 1. A carefully drawn block-diagram-level schematic would be easier to analyze than your text attempts. . 2. You wrote "aerial receiver" - what is that, a piece of powered gear or do you just mean "aerial"? 3. Are you saying that when only using the new splitter and the antenna that you get proper output? 4. Do you have something hooked up to the splitter's VHF input (I see there are two inputs)? – mike65535 Jul 23 '18 at 12:20
  • @mike65535 1. I've replaced the textual descriptions with a diagram, hope this helps. 2. When I say aerial receiver I mean the aerial (i.e. the box that you would terminate the cable into on the aerial). 3. I'm saying that I can't find a setup anymore where I get any output, even when I put it back as close to the original setup as I can. 4. Nothing is connected to the VHF input – Matt Jul 24 '18 at 8:46
  • If you tell us how far you are from your stations, or what the predicted power level is at your antenna, and also what type or antenna or gain it has, we will be in a better position to help. At my house, for instance, some of the stations I receive are at - 65 dBm. But I have both a mast mounted amp and a distribution amp. – SteveSh Jan 1 at 19:04
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So it turns out that this wasn't a signal or hardware issue, it was an air-gap issue. I'd incorrectly labelled one of the cables and ended up thinking both ends of the same cable were different cables (that's what you get running cables behind walls).

After discovering this and plugging the correct things into the right places, everything worked as expected - except I feel a lot sillier than I did before.

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how far are you from the signal? When i use the amplifyer with my OTA signal, I get zero stations. If you are too close to the signal, you need to remove the AMP.

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  • My bet is that a splitter is the only thing needed. ? – Alaska Man May 5 '19 at 17:41

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