"Pete C." wrote in message
...

Harold & Susan Vordos wrote:

Hey guys!
We live in an area with little television reception. I've avoided paying
for a dish, as I don't watch all that much TV. We get a PBS station,
along
with one of the Fox network stations. Good enough for us, as we get news
and
some interesting scientific shows.

Ok, now my question. I have a splitter in a room that is not heated.
As
weather turned colder, I started getting a lot of blue screen on the TV.
The colder it got, the worse the reception, until it got to the point
where
the TV was off more than it was on. About a week ago, I lit the
boiler
in the room where the splitter resides. Suddenly, great reception.
When
the room cooled off, after turning off the boiler, it was back to blue
screen once again. Heated the splitter and got service back. When it
cooled down, it was, once again, lost. Replaced the old splitter with
a
new one, which improved reception, but did not eliminate the problem.
Finally hung a small light bulb near the splitter, which I figured would
keep it warm. Sure enough, we now have great (albeit limited) reception
once again.

Anyone care to offer a reason for poor performance when a splitter cools
off
too much? I would suggest that it was in the 40 degree range, not
freezing. Why would it cooling off make a difference? I fully
expected
that it wouldn't be temperature sensitive.

Harold

Nothing to do with the splitter, it's the connections to the splitter,
what we termed "suck out" at the cable company when it happened on line
gear. What you have is "F" connectors which are little more than nuts
crimped onto a piece of coax with the copper coax center conductor
acting as the center pin for the connector. If that center conductor is
cut too short when things get cold and the metal contracts it will pull
back into the coax and out of the connection in the splitter or
whatever. The connections on the hard line coax on CATV line gear are a
little different, but the same effect can occur there with the center
conductor pulling out of the connection if it isn't cut long enough.

There is something that does not make sense about this. The thermal
expansion of the plastic insulation in coax is about 10 times that of the
center copper wire. The plastic basically determines the length of the cable
between the connector bodies, so I would think the wire would actually
protrude more as the temperature drops. This still could be a problem since
that might make cause the center connector to make contact with a grounded
shield in the splitter.