I was called out to a local hotel over the bank holiday weekend ( Sunday evening ), they had lost television reception in most of their rooms so I assumed it was going to be one of the aerial amps. The aerial itself is housed in the loft of a relatively new extension at the rear of the hotel, so that was very unlikely to be the cause of the trouble. The first place I looked was the loft of the old building where I remembered there was a very old collection of distribution amps. On inspection I found two old Aniference six way distribution amps and a four way splitter, signal from the aerial was good but my meter reading on one of the outputs of the second amp was jumping around all over the place. This indicated to me that the amp had a fault in it’s power supply. In the old analogue days the fault would have appeared as a band of interference travelling down the television screen, but these days the result is simply no reception on the television.
The obvious thing to do was replace the two amps with a single 16 way amp, this would tidy the system up and get rid of the awful splitter as well. The result was restoration of the signal to the affected televisions but I found, on measuring the signal at the tv points, that almost a third of the signal strength was being lost across what were fairly short lengths of cable. Looking outside the reason for that became clear, most of the cable I could see was so old it was crumbling away, infact the outer sheath was missing completely in many places. It was also a complete mess, not being secured to the walls or fascia in any way, it was just hanging in loops and looked a real eyesore. So a call back was needed to replace all the old cable and improve the appearance on the outside of the hotel, once this was done signal strength was up where I would expect it to be and reliable reception was returned to all the rooms.