Understanding the HDA-200

[lynnmcrae]

I split my cable signal where it enters the house to feed the main TV and a satellite TV. Until recently, a +18db drop amplifier has been sufficient to boost the digital signal to the remote TV, but something changed and now low channels (below 33) get a lot of breakup and signal drops. (If it matters, I am feeding a remote digital converter attached to an old TiVO box)

I tried just replacing the +18db amp with the HDA-20, hoping the extra amplification would be a simple fix. But when I put it in, I seem to get no signal through it at all. Questions ...

- is my underlying assumption correct .. am I making a like-for-like swap with simply more gain?
- there seems to be a little green hole near the power-in that i would guess could be a power indicator. However, there is no light there ... should there be? It is indeed plugged into a working power strip with coax connecting the transformer to the unit, to take care of the obvious
- what does the adjustable gain do, and how do I know what is low or high, min or max? it just seems to spin without any stopping point

Can you help me?
Thanks.

[winegard]

The HDA-200 has to have the green LED on in order for the HDA-200 to power up. We could have a defective wall transformer or coax jumper wire which is not providing voltage to the HDA-200 amplifier power in connection. Using a volt meter check the end of the coax jumper cable going from the wall transformer to the amplifier and see if we have approximately +15VDC going into the amplifier. The center conductor of the coax cable is the + point and the outside of the connector is the – point. If we do not have the +15VDC try another jumper wire or check the out put of the wall transformer to see if it is putting out a voltage. If we have the +15VDC going into the amplifier power in connection and the green LED does not light up then we have a defective HDA-200.

If you are using the power injector to send voltage to the amplifier instead of hooking directly the power in connector of the HDA-200 then make sure you have the +15VDC coming out of the power injector marked to amplifier. If you do not have a voltage coming out of the power injector it is defective.

The gain control is a 10 turn potentiometer, and you turn the control 10 turns counter clockwise to obtain the full 18dB of gain reduction. The gain control is used reduce the amount of incoming signal to prevent from having too much signal at the TV sets or to prevent have too much signal coming into the amplifier and overloading it.