Reed wrote:

SMS wrote:
Yesterday I wired a relatives house for cable. The analog cable works
fine, but when I plug in the digital cable box supplied by the cable
company it doesn't work at all. Is there anything special about
splitters for digital cable? I use Dish network, and I've really been
out of the loop as far as cable TV stuff. This is not Comcast, but a
small municipal cable company.

IIRC any splitters on digital must be "2 way". Most cheap splitters
are one-way. IOW, the digital cable box needs to transmit info back to
the head-end. Older analog cable boxes did not.

Splitters are not one-way or two-way, they all will pass signals in
either direction with the same predictable loss of 3.5db per split.
Where the cheap splitters have problems is with shielding and bandwidth.

You shouldn't be using any splitters not rated for at least 1GHz
bandwidth and 110db shielding on any cable system these days, and a few
cable systems as well as satellite may require a higher bandwidth.

Also, older analog cable boxes did indeed sent return data to the
head-end for things such as pay per view buys, things that far preceded
"digital" cable where the A/V is transmitted digitally.

Another thing to keep in mind is that many of the digital cable boxes
need to be plugged in and receiving data for quite some time before they
will work properly.