How are coaxial jacks around your house wired?

[chuckywang]

I have one coax cable coming in from my backyard to my basement. I have four coax cables from that basement to four rooms around my house. I need hook ups in three of those rooms (2 for cable TV and 1 for a cable modem). The four way splitter I'm using now isn't cutting it. The signal from my cable modem is really low (according to my ISP) and it frequently loses the signal. Furthermore, the signal to my TV's are less than ideal, as the picture is a little blurry and fuzzy (not crisp at all).

My question is how should these cables be hooked up? Do I need a better splitter? The reason that the cables weren't hooked up to begin with was that the basement was unfinished when we bought our house and we finished it ourselves.

 

[nullpointerus]

I have one coax cable run into the attic and connected to an 8-way distribution amplifier. Six of those lines are required for my two PVR-500's, one PVR-150, and two SDTV's, and one HDTV. No splitters are involved (except the PVR-500's internal splitters). Two caps are on the two unused outputs of the amp. The picture quality is excellent--no ghosting, static, or other distortions.

My advice to you is to pick up a 4-way distribution amplifier. Since you have a cable modem, make sure that the amp has some kind of reverse path filter on it; otherwise, the cable modem's upstream connection will suffer and Internet-related tasks will generally feel slow. You can find these things really cheaply on eBay, or by them new for about twice as much (i.e. $80).

EDIT: Before you buy anything, buy some coax caps at your local Home Depot (or similar store) and put one of them on the unused output of your existing 4-way splitter. Also, make sure that your splitter is properly grounded. Even if these don't completely solve your problems, you'll need a cap and a ground wire for the distribution amplifier anyway.