Distribution amp for multiple TVs? - Videokarma.org TV - Video

toxcrusadr · #1 04-22-2015, 05:25 PM

Short version: How can I hook up a bunch of tube TVs (not antique, recent but not flat screen HD) so they all play the same thing like the TV department at a store?

I volunteer at a huge charity garage sale and every year we get TVs donated. this time we hardly sold any, but I know people buy them for their kids to use for gaming, etc. We test them but we don't have them playing. Well, we had one playing off a DVD player, and guess which one got sold! I'm thinking if we could market them better, have them all playing off a DVD through some kind of distribution hub, we might do better.

It would be nice to have both 75 ohm cable and audio/video RCA outputs (red/wh/yellow) but if it was only one or the other we could deal with it.

Any ideas what hardware would be good for this? And it has to be cheap or free, again it's a charity benefit sale.

NoPegs · #2 04-22-2015, 05:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by toxcrusadr

Short version: How can I hook up a bunch of tube TVs (not antique, recent but not flat screen HD) so they all play the same thing like the TV department at a store?

Can you attempt to quantify "a bunch" for me? I may have what you need.

N2IXK · #3 04-22-2015, 05:55 PM

A surplus CATV modulator driving a 1:8 splitter or similar should work for RF.

If you want to do A/V, look for an AV distribution amp.

toxcrusadr · #4 04-24-2015, 05:52 PM

Thanks for the replies.

A bunch is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to a dozen I guess.

CATV modulator? I will have to look that up, I'm not sure what looks like. I think RF is probably best, some sets will have AV inputs but some will only have RF (cable) input. If we run everything off RF we would only need one gadget.

***Kamakiri*** · #5 04-24-2015, 07:52 PM

Agile modulator!

http://antiqueradio.org/HomeTVTransmitter.htm

All you need is one of these and a cable box/VCR/DVD player

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Blonder-Tong...item25a439b212

Then all you need are regular antennas and one pair of rabbit ears for the "transmitter".

toxcrusadr · #6 04-28-2015, 05:45 PM

Hey cool. There's a second Blonder Tongue like that listed for $89.99 or make offer, so I made an offer. Yours is quite a bit cheaper though.

I think I'd like to have one of these anyway for myself, since I have a couple old TVs it would be fun to send signals to. Thanks for the tip.

Only potential problem with this big garage sale event is having antennas for all the TVs. I suppose if the signal was strong enough we might be able to use one antenna with a splitter for several TVs.

Is it possible to take signal right off the video output of this thing and run it through a splitter, or does that not work?

David Roper · #7 05-09-2015, 05:23 AM

I'm a Comcast Customer. For my display area, I use an amplified 4-way splitter with each output feeding a passive 8-way splitter. Every unused port has a 75-ohm terminator to prevent any signal loss. This distribution scheme works perfectly, and the digital channels, which are converted by the cable box to NTSC for the coax output, look significantly better than the same content looks on its corresponding standard-def channel. Plus, the "HD zoom" can be set to eliminate letterboxing.