Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse HDTV Antenna Update

Today I wanted to tell you more about the Stream Eclipse HDTV Antenna that I set up a couple of weeks ago. So far, I’m happy with the antenna and it works well. I used the antenna to watch the Super Bowl. The picture was clear, better than I remember when I had FiOS TV. My wife and I watched the game without any reception problem.

In my setup video, Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse HDTV AntennaI showed you what the antenna looked like mounted on my family room way. Clearly, having the white antenna and long black coaxial cable running down the cream-colored wall wasn’t an acceptable solution. It looked terrible and there was no way my wife was going to agree to it as a long term solution. One possible solution would be to paint the antenna and cable the same color as the way, but that would really just camouflage the antenna a little bit.

As I mentioned in my last video, I ended up moving the ClearStream Eclipse into the sun room located right behind the family room. I could route the cable though the floor or a hole in the wall and mount the antenna in that room in one of a few locations. After a few days I decided to do that, but it being so cold out I didn’t feel like running the coax cable. Instead I took advantage of the two existing coax cables left over from my Fios TV installation. I attached existing cable behind my TV to the TV’s antenna jack and the existing jack in the sun room to the ClearStream Eclipse. When I turned on the TV, I had no signal. I had to go down to the basement on the other sider of the house and find where these two cables were attached to a splitter. I connected the two cables together with a connector and then I had signal.

While this approach worked, there where some issues. First, when I rescanned for channels, the TV only found 47 channels instead of 53, so I lost six channels. I didn’t mke a list of all the channels I previously had so I wasn’t sure which channels I lost. All was good for a while, but over the next several days, I found that sometimes the picture on the one channel I really wanted for freeze or stutter and the audio would drop out. And in some case, this channel wouldn’t come in at all. I mostly fixed this by tweaking the antenna location in the sun room. I don’t consider this a problem with the antenna. By using the existing cable I ended up replacing a 15 foot coax cable with some where between 70 to 90 ft of coax. The TV cables for the sunroom and family room are on one side of my house and they run the entire length to the other side of the house where the splitter is. Also I introduced more connectors into the cable this way. Both the extra length of cable and the splitters greatly reduce the signal significantly.

At some point I’ll need to run a shorter length cable. I’ll have more updates after I do that.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *