Of Misconnections

We bought a new TV to go into our house. It's a Vizio 32", can do 1080p and has gotten good/bad reviews -- the good: it has good picture quality for the price. The bad: it has a rep for poor reliability. Knowing that, we bought it from Costco because they take stuff back.

We're not really interested in paying a lot for cable/satellite TV so we're viewing OTA (over the air) transmissions and need an antenna. I had a small indoor one that appears to not have survived the move, or it has acquired a special kind of Maxwell's demon: it can only pick up Christian TV stations (really). That's all well and good (pun intended) but I wanted my PBS, too.

We had an old Radio Shack outdoor antenna I had in the attic of our old house, so I set it up in the family room and aimed it about where I thought the transmitting towers were, and suddenly we had 33 channels -- PBS included. Now that we had some variety, I needed to get that huge antenna out of the way. Our new attic is filled with heater and ventilation ducts, plus it's just plain HOT up there right now, so for temporary I thought I would use one of the upstairs bedrooms for the antenna. They all have a UHF cable as part of the low-voltage house wiring, so I had this bright idea of connecting the antenna there, then going to our distribution box and connecting the family room cable to the bedroom cable (thru a splitter, because I also needed a male/female adapter). So I made the connections and -- no signal to the TV. What's this all about??? So I put on my Failure Analysis hat, got my ohmmeter out, and started checking connections. Fortunately for me, the TV, splitter and antenna all have transformer inputs or outputs, so cables that are connected to them look like a low resistance. Check this one, check that one....no connection. Hmm. So I started randomly checking the other cables and quickly discovered that they were (mostly) mislabeled. I made a guess that the installers thought the area next to the Kitchen was the Living Room (not the Family room) and connected that to one of the outputs of the splitter. The input came from the other cable that ohmed out (it was the other bedroom). And suddenly the TV came alive again.

Now, in cases where everything is used in the expected fashion -- all cables connected to a distribution box and a known "live" input to it-- this wouldn't matter, because the signals don't care what the labels on the cable are. And I figure that the phone/ethernet labels probably are screwed up, too: but the same argument applies, so who would know. It's when you use something in an unexpected way that interesting discoveries are sometimes made.

Even so, I thing I will let our builder know, in order to provide feedback regarding the quality of the install.