I swear Ben makes a commission off this regularly occurring gimmick. You can have mine for free.

If you have a weak enough signal, the cable company will fix this for free. This item was originally marketed as a broadband booster, which it is not. I tried it on my entry, middle and exit points and it did nothing but cause broadband hiccups and tv interference in the line.

You just answered my question, thanks.

#1...while normally I do think stuff like this is a gimmick, the TV one genuinely works. My parents live around 40 minutes from NYC. Before the Trade Center went down, they received all their TV OTA.

After they went down, all signals were shifted to the Empire State Building. Parents lost almost all signal.

When HD came, they were excited in the hopes the situation would improve. They got a new, exterior antenna on the roof and properly oriented it. Still nothing. They bought one of these as a last ditch effort and it solved the issue.

Maybe for some people they're BS. The broadband one I don't see as helping since if your cable connection sucks that bad, this won't help.

It depends on what the problem is. If you have low SNR before the cable gets to your premises, this will not help.

If instead you have decent SNR at the premises box and signal drops due to use of multiple splitters it is exactly what you need. It does work for broadband internet as well, but again it is only if you had a good signal that splitters dropped too low... typically cable modems start to drop out at about -15dBmV, if you are below that figure out why but if you are above it don't bother with the amp.

Note that they also sell a weatherized version for about $50 which should be used if your first split is at the exterior premises box.

Also note that while it has 3 coax connectors, you can't use this alone to split one line into two unless you buy an accessory power injector, otherwise as shipped one of the connectors is for the power supply alone and the other two are just input and output for only one cable run. That config can still work with a splitter after it, IF you don't have too many splitters in series before your TV/modem/etc.

I deployed one of these and immediately saw an improvement on my analog sets. However, over time, I took broadband off this because it seemed to cause outages. I then lost some channels on the DVR and taking this thing out completely fixed that problem. I'm not sure if this device degraded over time or the characteristics of my cable service changed such that this thing caused more problems than it solved. My analog TVs still look fine after I removed it so I'm guessing it's the latter.

If you get a lousy signal you can also call your cableco to fix it and they might already put something like this in for you if it's required. It's probably better to get them to do something to fix it.

The price is not bargain at all but device may help to improve quality of picture if weak signal.

#6 - It will *not* improve signal quality.

Any added connector between you and the source of your data is going to add attenuation. You *might* gain a signal where none was there before due to the item, but it won't be pretty. Also, anyone attributing his type item to a better picture? I will guess it's because all connections were checked and re-tightened during the change.

Any straight connector (assuming it is reasonable quality and age and/or cleaned of residue or oxidation) tends to cause less than 1dBmV loss.

This booster's amp causes an additional -2dBmV loss.

Each (average and typical quality used in cable installations) splitter causes -4dBmV loss.

This booster also causes 15dB signal gain from the amp. So... suppose you had a 1dBmV signal where the community cable run hits your house. Suppose you have a splitter there for two cable runs in the house, now each is at about -3dBmV.

If that -3dBmV goes straight to a cable modem or tv, great, that is enough for any decent tuner. If on the other hand you have more than a total of two devices on the cable line, you're adding more splitters. Suppose one of those cable runs is split again for a TV and cable modem. Now you're at -7dBmV... still ok, BUT suppose your cable connectors aren't new, suppose they weathered a bit in the outside premises boxes, and you have another splitter... now you may be below -14dBmV at the TV set or modem.

Putting this splitter on the cable run after you already had the signal losses, like at the TV or only a splitter or two before it won't work very well because you already had a low SNR, it amplifies the noise as well as the signal.

Instead you want it as far upstream as possible so the additional noise and loss introduced further downstream in the cable run is happening to a signal that had the minimum amount of noise amplified as possible. Scientifically speaking, these DO work to do exactly what they are meant to do, it will improve signal quality to the extent that signal quality is SNR and you must have a SNR high enough that the tuners can differentiate the data...

As with all things digital, it is only 0's or 1's but the determination of whet... [Truncated]