Cable TV Amp problems

[cgarrett]

Hi all, I can't seem to get the cable TV amp working in my 5th wheel. The light comes on until I put the coax cable on the TV, as soon as it touches the light goes out. When I take the cable off the TV the booster light comes back on. Channel scan comes up with nothing, Any help would be appreciated.

Chris

[Tail_gunner]

Did it ever work correctly?

One of the first mods I did to our 2013 Eagle 284BHS was to ditch the oem antenna booster and install a Winegard SensarPro


During the install, it became apparent the OEM one was not hooked up correctly. It took quite a bit of experimenting to figure out where the different coax cables were coming from/ going to. But I eventually got it figured out. It definitely out performs the cheap oem antenna booster.

[cgarrett]

No it never worked!

[RoyBraddy]

Are you hooking to CABLE TV or the OTA ROOF MOUNTED BATWING type antenna service.

First thing I would is make sure the TV is working normal... If you at home maybe you can run a cable out to the TV from your home CABLE TV hookup. If the TV is portable maybe take it inside the house and hookup to see if it works ok...

The OTA ANTENNA has a pre-amp installed in the base of of the antenna on the roof. When you push the BUTTON on the antenna panel you are sending up 12VDC from your trailer to power up the pre-amp in the BATWING antenna indicating by the antenna light that comes on. This 12VDC is riding on the same cable the TV SIGNAL is going to be received on so if the light goes off is telling me that the TV line you are using is shorting out the TV signal which in turn is also shorting out the 12VDC voltage at the same time... The TV SIGNAL that comes back down the same line is sampled off to the TV using a built-in capacitor which isolates the 12VDC VOLTAGE potential from the TV signal.

I would make sure the TV is working first with the same cable you are plugging into the antenna panel by using some other means - then tackle the 12VDC PREAMP power problem.

I suspect the cable you are using that feeds the TV set is shorted to ground (bad connector).

Just my comments
Roy Ken

[Tail_gunner]

Originally Posted by cgarrett

No it never worked!

In the past, I installed a 30 amp RV outlet on the outside of my garage. As long as I was running romex electrical cable, I ran a line of coax also. So I have both electric and cable tv sources on the end of my garage to plug my camper into. The cable tv outlet was of great help when I had to troubleshoot the messed up install of the oem antenna amplifier.

I hooked the cable tv from the garage up to the inlet jack on the left rear corner of the camper. Then I disconnected all the coax cables at the oem antenna booster. Then I proceeded to try each of them in turn, connecting them to the tv until I found one that supplied a cable tv signal to the camper's television. Once I had the cable source line identified, I labeled it.

Then I hooked the outside cable tv source to the output jack under the awning. Again I tried the different coax cables until I found the one that provided a cable tv signal to the camper's tv. Again I labeled it.

By this point, I'm running out of coax cables. By tugging and moving the remaining 2 coax cables I was able to determine which one went to the RV's tv. Then, since it was the only one left, the last one had to be from the antenna.

Once I had all the coax cable routing figured out, hooking them up to the appropriate connectors on the new Winegard antenna amplifier was easy.

[cgarrett]

Thanks for the great advice, I do think its some sort of short and will try and figure this out. Thanks again for your posts.