Sunday, July 28, 2013

Quest for MeTV Continues

It’s kind of a joke now, trying to get in one extra station on the bottom of the UHF band…. and losing… so we received the SensarPro RFL-342 in white, I ordered the black one, go figure. If you look at the amplifier panel that Keystone installed, it has an output on the front of the panel for the bedroom TV. The new SensarPro does not have an external port for the TV, ugh.

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So, I bought an extension box, drilled a hole in it and inserted a  coax connector for the bedroom TV. Here it is after drilling the hole and installing the coax connector.

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I drilled new pilot holes for the bracket that will hold the new box and screwed in the frame.WP_20130727_022

I then fished the new coax cable into the opening up inside the roof and connected the one leg to the connector that will feed the bedroom TV. I had to trim the box as well because the connectors hit the frame, so I trimmed until everything fit.

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I then re-used the splitter from the factory and connected the outside TV connector and the new bedroom TV coax, this way everything works like it did from the factory.

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This is the completed install, all connections work as they did from the factory, I also now have a correct connection for the bedroom TV. I have ordered a white dual coax plate for the other connectors so they match. The new SensarPro did absolutely NOTHING to improve channel reception in this park so it looks like I need to order the JACK HD antenna to help, but I think this park just can’t get the channels no matter what I do, but when we go on the road the new UHF wingman add-on and the SensarPro will bring in a lot of stations so future trips will reap the benefits of this work. I also like how well the new box looks, plus the wiring is solid, no chance of bad connections.

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Does it look ok? I am going to replace the other plates with white so they all match.

Oh yeah, I also installed a Gen-1 Apple TV, so now we have more options for when we have good Internet connections. Winking smile

6 comments:

Rod Ivers said...

Typical ham... Buy something new and then rewire the whole thing......LOL And you didn't see any of those gold connectors on the factory wiring.....either..

Erik's RV Blog said...

Rod - Yeah, we HAMS can't help ourselves. The factory wiring leaves something to be desired. I thought having 10db above the factory amplifier would help, it did nothing.

I am thinking of going with the JACK HD antenna, but wouldn't be shocked if it didn't help. The upside is when on the road we will get the best reception available.

TexCyn said...

I've been to many places that didn't have any reception, nor wifi..nor cell phone service...but often, that's the price of state parks.

I had a satellite dish for awhile with DirectTV, and made them mad because I put a splitter on the cable so I could simply switch back to DTV when the cable was down or if I traveled without the dish. But now I'm just simply back on the DTV box & a simple system. With lots of non English stations!

Isn't life grand?? ;-)

If you can't find white face plates, maybe you can simply spray paint the black ones to white?

Erik's RV Blog said...

TexCyn - I just ordered the JACK antenna, call me stubborn but if that doesn't work, we just will have to live with it.

I found white plates at Home Depot, so I'll be picking them up before this weekend.

Andrew said...

Looks great to me! You probably did better than the factory did! Too bad it doesn't work any better than before though hopefully the jack does.

Erik's RV Blog said...

Andrew - Well, the JACK antenna will be my last attempt at improving TV reception. If we can't get Retro or MeTV we'll just deal with it.