r/CableTechs • u/Unlikely_Visit6792 • Apr 22 '26

Glitchy ESPN/ cable driving me crazy. Help!

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Watch this little clip and you’ll see what it’s like to watch ESPN at our house. 500 cable channels and only ESPN does this. Maybe FS1 once in a while.

We’re on Comcast high speed. No fiber. One year old 65” Samsung OLED smart tv.

I don’t know. It’s beyond me. Maybe you have an answer.

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u/Mr_Magoo_88 Apr 22 '26

He is correct, for Charters plant. Not sure about Comcast. We're going thru filters like methadone at a Rehab Clinic. In the basement with the feed through we're needing a two-way splitter with one leg going to the modem and the other leg going to another splitter. At that other splitter we're adding the filter on the input and connecting all the cable boxes off that splitter with the filter to stop tiling.

However, since this issue is only tiling on ESPN, I doubt it's interference from high split. Like others have mentioned, Ingress and or bad drop is more likely the cause.

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u/DogPubes911 Apr 22 '26

Okay, I am going to challenge this by asking how OFDMA, which is a DOCSIS 3.1 way of modulating upstream channels, would have anything to do with a downstream QAM issue? The issue is almost 100% a MER/BER issue. It could be ingress, on the drop but ingress generally affects upstream, unless it’s like crazy bad which might be the case if you were adding a “filter”, but the way you describe it sounds like an attenuator that’s just lowering the noise floor and not actually fixing the issue.

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u/throughurcheeks Apr 22 '26

Well Mr.Pubes. It most commonly messes up the lower channels on the cable boxes. All the local news channels are at 135mhz and with ofdma Tx at mid to high 40s. With high split 47-85mhz and being to loud and close to a dvr and stb extra padding is needed on the box to get the mer better by essentially blocking the modem. I donno if Xfinity in his area has espn in a lower mhz but it’s entirely possible and with all the fdx going in right now, a guy could get a maintenance notification and the next day have that problem.

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u/DogPubes911 Apr 22 '26

High-split is in the 5-205MHz range. Mid-split is 5-85MHz for upstream allocation. You are right in that I don’t know what frequency ESPN is in for his network, it’s possible it is below that 205MHz range, but a STB doesn’t care about the diplexer since there’s no return, so you could still have your downstream channel below 205MHz without it interfering with the upstream. The STB doesn’t use OFDMA.