“Cable is Never as Good as OTA Reception”

jpainter01

Cable is never as good as OTA reception
#0, by jpainter, 29 November 2012 06:05 AM
With most OTA stations being digital now, we find that the quality of OTA programming on our HD TV is excellent. When we hook up to cable . . . . the picture is never crisp and clear and sometimes it’s awful. We do change the setting of the little button that switches from ant to cable, which allows the cable to come through, but doesn’t make it good. We always do the channel search and get the channels, they just are not clear.
At one campground we complained about the quality of the cable and the manager brought out a tiny tv and hooked the cable from the pole directly to his TV and the picture looked fine. He said it must be something in our rig that was the problem. That wasn’t a very fair test as any picture will look more clear on a tiny TV than it does on a the large flat screen in the rig.
My gut says that the quality of the cable is the real issue but it would be a 3 man job to dismount the TV, have two people hold it while a 3rd person connected the cable directly to the TV to do a “direct to TV” check that avoided all the rig wiring and connections.
Has anyone else experienced this and found a solution?
Jean Painter

Passenger!
2011 Cameo 37CKSLS “Cammie”
2011 Ford 350 2WD Dually

gtfiver

Re: Cable is never as good as OTA reception
#1, by gtfiver, 29 November 2012 09:58 AM
My experience is also that the cable signal is often poor at many camgrounds. I typically don’t worry about it much since we have a satellite dish and only use the cable if the local channels don’t come in off the air well. If you don’t have a satellite, one thing you might try is to find the satellite coax (should be in the area of your entertainment system somewhere) and connect that to the second coax input on the back of the TV (assuming there is one). Then when you set up at a campground that has cable, connect the campground’s cable to the satellite input on your docking station. The satellite coax does not have splitters or amplifiers in the circuit, so this should give you a clean signal into the TV. Disadvantage is that the satellite feed may not be distributed elsewhere in your coach. But at least you can see if the issue is with the campground’s cable signal or due to some issue with your coach’s wiring. Hope that helps.

jpainter

Re: Cable is never as good as OTA reception
#2, by jpainter, 01 December 2012 07:00 AM
Excellent troubleshooting idea! Thanks
Jean Painter

Passenger!
2011 Cameo 37CKSLS “Cammie”
2011 Ford 350 2WD Dually

B.W.Gentry
Owner/Admin
2007 Carri-Lite XTRM5
Breckenridge, TX

Topic