Customer Reviews

PCT 1-PORT BI-DIRECTIONAL CABLE TV HDTV AMPLIFIER SIGNAL BOOSTER WITH PASSIVE RETURN PATH

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This Drop Amp works great! I have a two story home with a several TV's at the far end of the house that never had clear pictures. They have always been grainy and just never looked right. Well after talking with the cable company they told me they could come out and put an amp on the cable to boost the signal and it would cost me a service fee plus the cost of the amp which would be a total of $150 bucks. I would have thought they should have fixed it for nothing. Luckily I talked with a friend of mine who had once worked for a cable company and he told me that I could get an amp myself and recommended one of these. So I bought one and installed it myself! It took maybe ten minutes to get this thing up and running! I also found "thanks to the cable company" they had extra splitters in my cable run in the attic that was not needed "this will also degrade your signal". Now my TVs have clear pictures and look great all for $35 bucks!

Picked this up on the strength of the reviews here. The DTV is working fairly well at my pad, but two stations are weak (drop outs), and I never could pick up one that I knew existed (58). Plugged the unit in (no more than 3 feet from the DTV converter box and immediately picked up 7 new stations. Can't see any signal degradation either. (Zenith DTV converter box, sony vega TV, and the old style roof antenna, one that never received UHF signals well). Great little amp!

I have tried signal boosters in the past with limited success. This is the first one that works fantastically well. The improvement in picture quality is astounding.

This OTA (over the air) amplifier placed between your antenna (as close as possible to the antenna) and your HDTV antenna input will only do some good if the signal is weak. If the signal is strong enough but is occasionally interrupted by GKW (god knows what - aircraft, trucks, heavy precipitation, etc) you may not notice much, if any, improvement. That seems to be the case with me. My home is just over the top of a small hill between the city and my street. I am trying to get by with an indoor antenna (but a good one with four ganged elements mounted high on a coatrack, no less) and normally I have just minor dropouts occasionally. With the amplifier installed at the end of 6 feet of cable from the antenna, power applied, feeding about 12 feed of cable to the TV I still have these dropouts. So it may not be a case of weak signal (25 miles from the transmitting antennae), but uncorrectable signal interruption. So, I'll keep it but this is just to let you know it isn't a cure all for your OTA signal problems. It works as it should; it may or may not help you in your particular situation.

This worked great for my outdoor antenna. I hooked it up and much to my surprise, the digital signal was strengthened and picked up a couple more channels. I highly recommend this product. This worked way better than the cheap Phillips amplifier from Walmart that did not work at all.

I purchased this signal booster to push the cable signal approx 300ft from my house to the garage. Before installing the booster I was unable to receive any channel that weren't snowy in yhe garage. Now all the channels have a great picture. I could not believe my eyes when I saw the dramatic change in picture quality. This device is amazing and I highly recommend it to anyone having trouble with a snowy picture or trying to send the signal to multiple TV's. I have not tried it yet with my Comcast Cable WiFi due to there is only only one output. I am planning on purchashing a second booster for this purpose. Also this booster is very simple to install and comes with everything required to install a single signal boost. Buy this and you won't be dissapointed !! Also note that it is bi-directional which allows you to use this booster with a cable modem.

I have this amp right after the pre-amp coming from a DB4. From the amp I've split it to two different floors, at the end of the longer run it splits again going into two d-tv receivers. The Amp does a great job sending the signal down the line.

I have one D-TV station that is 90 degrees from the rest of the stations. If I go straight into one receiver I get a solid signal, the moment I split it with out any boosting I loose the signal. With this Amp on the line at the point of entry I get the same signal strength after two splits that I get when going straight from the antenna.

Just to clarify - it doesn't help me get better reception, it just keeps the signal strength strong from deteriorating on the long and split cable runs.

I have a DB8 HD antenna in my attic which was pulling in some pretty good signal but with 80ft of cable I thought I would try a signal booster to see what would happen. My existing channels increased slightly from about 60-70 to 70-80 signal strength. What is nicer is that I am now receiving additional channels. This signal amplifier is built very nice and the instructions were easy to understand.

I bought the Motorola BDA-S1 and this PCT amp to try head to head. BTW, this PCT amp is also sold as a Channel Master product. The specifications of the PCT and Motorola amps are so similar that it seemed likely that they both contain the same integrated circuit.

Motorola Signal Booster BDA-S1 1-Port Cable Modem TV HDTV Amplifier

The BDA-S1 certainly has the more impressive enclosure with its large, heavy and black enclosure worthy of "Tim, the tool man Taylor." However, nothing is inside of either product except one integrated circuit chip, so neither product is really superior to the other in that regard. The enclosure on the PCT is perfectly adequate.

Swapping out the Motorola and PCT amps a few times, I found that they performed identically on all stations, whether strong, extremely weak, or middle of the road. Both amps cleaned up the glitches on all of the stations that I expected to receive in pristine condition. Both amps allowed me to add one low power analog station that I couldn't receive without an amp. Neither amp caused any degradation to the quality of any station. Both amps produced identical signal strengths on all channels as measured by the on-screen signal strength meter of my plasma.

The short story is that I've given this PCT amp five stars. The Motorola BDA-S1 gets four stars for delivering the same excellent performance but at a higher price.

Read on if you're interested in the conditions of the comparison. If not, you're done.

I dropped Comcast as of June 1 in favor of broadcast HDTV and Netflix streaming. My antenna farm is located in the loft of a detached garage. Currently, my UHF antenna is the primary antenna, augmented by two VHF antennas that only receive one channel each.

WINEGARD HD9095P UHF High-Gain 39-Element HDTV Antenna

Antennacraft Y5-7-13

Winegard YA-1713 High Band VHF HDTV Antenna

There's a lot of wiring loss before the signal gets to the TV. The two VHF antennas are joined in a Monster Standard RF Splitters For CATV Signals MKII - 2 Way RF Splitter, the output of that is joined with the UHF in a Blonder-Tongue ZUVSJ, followed by 125 feet of RG6 quad shield through the detached garage, then underground to the basement of my house, and then on to the plasma. As the system has grown, I found that I needed to add an antenna amp.

Each amp was used in remotely powered mode. The amp being tested was placed just after the ZUVSJ in the garage using a one foot jumper. Neither amp includes a power inserter, so the remote power was provided by using a Pico-Macom HLSJ as a power inserter from inside the basement of the house. There is about 100 feet of quad shield between the power inserter and the amp.

Finally, pay no attention to the geniuses who insist that products like the PCT and BDA-S1 signal amplifiers cannot be used with broadcast HDTV signals. A good RF amp is a good RF amp. Both products cover the entire broadcast TV spectrum and then some, and both have an input noise figure of about 2.5 db. Both products deliver exceptional performance as antenna amps, exactly as their specifications would suggest. True, neither product is packaged for direct exposure to precipitation, but that's an entirely different matter from saying that they only work on cable TV systems. There is a lot of really bad advice in these customer reviews.

Amplifier works fine. However power supply rather odd. Need a separate (provide yourself) co-ax cable to get power from transformer to amplifier.