[OT] TV Connection Issues

[Philip Coombes <philip.coombes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I hope someone here can shed a little light on an issue I have with my
TV connection at the moment.

I had a TV guy in this week to install a new aerial and an extra socket.
During the course of this he found an issue with a cable running from
the TV+Sky back up to the distribution amp in the loft so he changed it.
The first problem is that he (like the Sky guy before him) just left all
the connections he'd put in as cables running though holes in plaster.
This looks really untidy so I spent most of this afternoon replacing
them all with proper aerial and f-type sockets on the wall. All bar one
works fine which, due to where the wires were left, needed to be a combo
aerial and satellite faceplate. This is the second Sky feed (for
Skyplus) and the RF connection back up to the loft, which also carries
the Sky out to the rest of the house. When the second Sky connection is
connected to the socket the Sky that gets fed back around the house has
a lot of interference on it, when it's removed it's fine. This was all
working fine when the connections were wires that ran through the walls
to the bits of kit directly.

The sockets themselves are shielded and share a clamp that touches both
of the outer metal shieldings on the cables and I'm wondering it
something is getting from the Sky cable to the aerial one and messing it
up. The rest of the TV channels going out on the RF connection are fine,
just the Sky one is mashed. I notice when connecting either of the Sky
cables to the f-type sockets, that sparks are prone to appear so perhaps
it is a voltage build-up somewhere that is not being grounded but don't
really know where to go next with this. I am probably going to try an
unshielded socket in the hope that the connections will be separate but
I would like to understand why the problem is occurring in the first
place really. Curiously the interference occurs when the feed to the
dish _and_ the Sky box are both connected. Disconnect the link to the
Sky box _or_ the connection on the faceplate to the dish and it's fine.

Cheers

Phil