I had Comcast come out to my house, which is a very rare event, let me tell you. I don't let anyone near my setup. I had splitters everywhere and I'm on the end run of the cable on my block, so I put in a Weingard unidirection amplifier to boost the signal for my 5 sets. Well, it turns out that was not a good thing.

The Comcast box has a +5db to -5db limit which is a 10db range, which means if the signal is over 5db, you get pixelization, and if it's under, you may lose the picture. VCR's and TV's have a -15db to +15dg limit, which is 30db range, so it is more forgiving.

They removed my amplifier, and put in a splitter with an attenuator of -6.5db on the box side and on the other side ran my five sets. It was also better as Comcast did not get confirmation on my box of the signals they were sending me.

It turned out I had a bad box and they did all the splitters at no charge, but pushed me into the maintenance program of $3.50 which I'm not going to do.

All digital tuners can get over loaded which is not the case with analog tuners. Many users have had to to use signal attenuators to cut down strong signals to their digital tuners.