On February 13, 2006 at 21:14, Kevin C S said...
I always understood that regular splitters were
not intended to be used in reverse - hence they
are labelled as such (one in, two outs)?
Yeah, exactly.
I had
a problem with cable TV reception a long time
ago and a reversed splitter was the problem -
put it the right way and everything was fixed.
What would be the difference between the two above
splitters then? Only one states it can be used
as a "combiner".
I think they just didn't bother to write it.
I first heard of splitters as being splitters/combiners, and have never heard of any device called a splitter that cannot be used backwards. Devices called taps and drop taps are highly directional, but not splitters.
As for BACKWARDS --
I once had a problem with a splitter that was put in backwards, and putting it in forwards corrected it, too.
But wait a minute -- it's not possible to have it in backwards: it has one input and two outputs! How do you "backwards" three wires? It has, for argument's sake, one input and two outputs. If you hook it up forwards, one cable signal in goes out to two TVs. But if you hook it up "backwards," well, then only one "input" is there, and it will go to a TV; one "output" will bring in the signal from the cable.
So what do you do with the third connector? If you connect it to a TV, then you do NOT have the splitter hooked up backwards. You have it more, say, sideways; one TV is on the input, one TV is on an output, and the cable signal is on an output.
Your problems with this connection arise from the two TVs now being connected almost directly to one another. When I had this problem, one channel was messed up on one TV...until I changed the channel on the other TV. Then the first TV had a messed-up channel, but it was a different one. Also, the TV connected to the "input" had decent signal level but the TV connected to "output" had lousy signal level.
This is all because there is little isolation between the input and both outputs, and there is much more isolation between the two outputs. If you directly connect two TV cable inputs together, the TVs will interact as I describe (this is in the analog world; Lord knows what digitals will do in this case).
With the splitter hooked up sideways, you had little isolation between the two TVs' cable inputs, so they interacted; the cable signal was strong into the TV on the "input" because there is little isolation from output to input; the other TV had a weak cable signal because there is a lot of isolation from one output to another.
