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Originally Posted by BroadHopper
The units were originally wired with cable in the BRs, LRs, and kitchen. Because of the analog cable and the serial wiring, the technician disconnected the original cable and ran a digital cable from the outside box to the garage. In the garage he put a 'union' and told me to have an electrican route all the outlets in the house to the union. Big bucks!
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As I suspected, it sounds like you have all old wiring. There really is no such thing as analog and digital cable. The difference is in the type of signal sent over the cable. Without getting too technical, what is really the issue is the quality of the cable to carry a reliable signal, and more specifically, it's shielding (the ability to exclude interference from other sources). You are most likely picking up noise on your old wiring (TV signals, radio, wireless, electric, etc) that is interfering with your signal.
New wiring would have better shielding, hence the recommendation that you upgrade all your internal wiring. (As you note, for an existing house, usually big bucks)
You also need to consider the weakest link problem. Namely, if you upgrade all your internal wiring, but the wire from outside is still bad, your signal will still be bad. Conversely, if you upgrade underground but don't do the internal, you may still have a problem. Though the closer you can get the good signal to the end, the better your chances of overcoming signal problems.
Hard to tell without seeing things, but it sounds as if what you are describing as a "union" is just a big, more specialized splitter. It may have some amplification capabilities from the small amount of power on the cable. But unless it has a plug and it's own power source, it's probably not an amp.
Sounds like he upgraded your line from where it comes out of the ground into your garage, and set things up so IF you rewired the house, you could run all the lines back to this 6-output splitter in the garage.
Still leaves you with the problem of the bad line from the pole to your garage.
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I took a look at what I got. The cable ran from the union to the LR where there is a splitter into two cables, one for the TV and one for the router. Shouldn't there be two cables from the union to avoid the splitter?
I notice there are two outside boxes where the cable come out of the ground. One for each unit. I notice there is a splitter between the ground wire and the two boxes. I don't know the difference between a splitter and a union other than the union in the garage allow up to six cables to be attached. Can I get away from all the splitters?
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I'm also assuming that what you are calling a router is actually your cable modem. I.e. the device where the cable attaches on the back, and coming out from it is your network/computer cable.
Whether he split the cable in the LR or in the garage really doesn't matter. Assuming both your TV and computer needs are in the LR, it was easier to split the signal there to save running two lines the whole way. In the end, he needed to get a signal to your TV and to your cable modem, which I assume is also located in your LR.
Getting a bit deep for this forum at this point, and probably more than you or everyone else wanted to know. If you want to learn more, I suggest trying one of many audio/video/cable forums out there, perhaps starting with the Metrocast one.