Anyone care to provide some tips on how I can improve my cable TV reception?

I have TW Cable in a 19 year old house. The cable comes into the house immediately to a 3 way splitter. One leg goes to a RoadRunner cable modem, another to a 42" plasma HDTV in the basement and the third goes to yet another splitter. That downstream splitter provides the signal to 4 other TV's on the upper floors. The picture on the plasma TV is gorgeous and the broadband cable works with no discernable hiccups.

The upper floors have original wiring (RG 59?) and the terminations are not something I'm proud of. The reception on the TV's upstairs is poor. Some lower staions are acceptable, but the channels in what I'll call the mid-range (45 - 72) have a lot of snow. TW has been out a couple of times and done what they think is their responsibility. I'll have to pay them their hourly rate to probe further.

I finished the basement 8 years ago so the RG 6 wiring is newer and the terminations are better.

I suspected the wiring and terminations were the culprits. Since I've got half a spool of RG 6 left over, I decided to do an experiment. I cut a piece of coax long enough to run from the cable entry point directly to the farthest TV. I read up on terminating coax, bought a professional crimping tool and carefully terminated the ends with crimp connectors. I planned to just disconnect each TV's cable at the splitter and temporarily connect it with the new cable to see if the picture was better. If it was, I'd figure out a way to permanently run new wire to those wall outlets.

To my surprise, when I connected the temporary cable, I lost the signal on every TV in the house. So I reversed the experiment and reconnected everything back to the way it was before I started. Still no picture on any TV.

I was really scratching my head here, but finally disconnected the main cable where it connects to the first splitter, waited a few moments and then reconnected it. Voila...TV pictures again.

1. So what did my experiment do. Clog up the electrons in the "pipe?"

2. How would you start down the path to improve the reception?

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