Preamp dead?
 

I think my preamp died last night. RCA tvpramp1 model. New unit installed it last night. Was working fine for about 4 hours then all channels dropped.

But suddenly a VHF-HI channel I was not getting started showing up.

I went from 39 UHF only channels to 9, 1 VHF channel 11 and it's 2 subs and 1UHF channel 16 and it's 5 subs.

Location report;


http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...2c15699c13a677

Was the preamp overloading channel 11 and it only started showing up after the preamp died or is something else going on?

I have another RCA preamp and a new CM7778. When I replace the preamp would it help to set it to separate VHF/UHF inputs and leave the VHF input empty to see if will help to get the VHF channel without it overloading it? Assuming that is what happened.

Antenna is a home made McClapp DB4 10 x 9.5, no reflector pointed at 120 degrees true roof mounted at appx 25 feet AGL. Cable run is appx 100 feet to one TV and the splitter, 40 more feet to the second TV.

This is a new OTA setup, trying to dump sat tv and it's $135 monthly bill.

Possible.

I would try a single cable from one of the antennas to the TV, and see what I got.

I ran home from work and replaced the power injector, same result. So I went up on the roof to replace the preamp and thought lets see what happens with no preamp at all. I disconnected the amp and power injector, both TV's are running just from the antenna.

I did this when I first built and mounted the antenna but results were not great which is why I ordered the amps. This time after running auto scan on both TV's I'm getting 40 channels on the living room and 30 in the bedroom. No amp at all. Go figure. I did tweak the runs and direction of the antenna since then though.

I'll let this run a few days this way and see what happens. For now it looks like I won't need an amp after all.

I'm off tomorrow and will pull all new cable for the antenna since I'm using the existing cable that the sat installer put in. I can shorten the run to the bedroom by quite a bit that way and should be able to pick up the other 10 channels that I'm getting in the living room. I need to ground the mast and coax anyway.

Still strange that it ran fine for 4 to 5 hours before going wacky on me. Maybe it was overloading all the time?