I’m trying to get the (coax) cabling in my house to behave. I’ve lived in the house 4 years, but it has never quite worked as it should.
My house is a 3 story townhouse, built in the 1980s. Let’s call the floors L1 (basement), L2 (bedrooms), L3 (living).
Here’s what I know:
- The “tap” (where the cable arrives from the street) is on L2 in the master bedroom.
- From there, it hits a splitter - one “leg” goes upstairs to L3, one goes downstairs to L1.
- There is a cable outlet in each of the 2 guest bedrooms; neither of these outlets is ‘live’, i.e. it doesn’t see the signal from the cable company.
- However, the two outlets in the bedrooms are connected to each other - I verified this by hooking up a TV / VCR.
- Upstairs on L3, where the cable arrives, behind the wall plate there is another cable that leads downwards inside the wall, but I haven’t been able to find out what it’s connected to. I hooked up a VCR to it, and tried hooking a TV to the cable outlets in the guest bedrooms, but no dice.
There is very little access to cabling in my place - everything’s hidden inside walls, with no access panels. My girlfriend points out that the cabling almost definitely worked when the house was built - the previous owners must have split, cut or otherwise mutilated it since then.
My goal is to figure out how to get the outlets in the two guest bedrooms to “see” the signal.
I have Googled the hell out of this - the only vaguely useful site I found was a page on DSL Reports which explained the difference between a “loop” and a “home run” topology. I’m pretty sure I have a loop.
As a bonus question - are there any tools that help in a situation like this? How would an experienced cable guy tackle it? I was thinking of something like a signal generator, and some kind of detector for tracing the cable through the walls.
Thanks for any help. This is driving me nuts. When the cable guy came out a couple years back, his “solution” was to drape a wire around the baseboards with tacks.
Here’s a little diagram in case it helps:
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L3 | Signal OK from L2. +-------- cable going nowhere?
---------------|--------------------------
L2 cable from street --+ Main | B1 --+-- B2 |
---------------|--------------------------
L1 | Basement - signal OK from L2 |
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B1 & B2 have no signal but are connected to each other.