I had a situation with a drop in Rx power. When I tested a location from the roof of the customer’s house the Rx power was -78 with a 5’ patch cable. Once I ran the cable to their router the signal dropped to -83. The cable run was no longer then 30’. Is it possible there is a voltage drop in the cable resulting in a power drop? One of our techs has reported before that shortening the cable length increases the power. Has anyone seen a situation like this?
Could depend on the quality of cabling also… just a thought.
No. It’s just a fluke. That was the Rx level at the SM which is passive. The SM will run on anything from 9VDC up to 36VDC.
I’d guess it’s probably because when testing he was standing near the SM, and then after running the cable he wasn’t.
I have seen the surge modules cause a big reduction in rx strength… the surge was good but when I took it out the rx went way up…
good cable like belden 7919a fixes lots of things.
Hi Jerry, I am the tech that Jared was speaking of. I wasn’t standing near the dish when testing the first time, I already learned that lesson 
What happened was, the homeowner had run his own CAT-5 throughout his house. I was attempting to connect to his network in his basement. The quality of his cable and/or the length could not be determined. But I placed the power supply in the basement at the end of my cable run, and used a “lightning” box to connect to his cable. I tested it from his upstairs office once with the power supply upstairs, and then with the power supply downstairs in the basement. There was a 4 to 5dbm difference. I no longer connect to existing wiring at a customer location unless I see no difference in link quality or dbm.
I hope to keep in touch Jerry! I learn a lot from your posts.
It doesn’t make sense that the Rx strength would change with voltage to the SM but stranger things have happened.
It would be interesting to put an SM on a variable power supply and see what the performance is like at 12, 18, 24, 30 VDC
My thoughts also… I am going to run that test this week… I will let you know what comes of it… 
When dealing with 900 SMs I have noticed that longer cable runs off of the batteries I use tend to cause poor link tests. But when I put the same cable on a canopy power supply the link test will perform at 100%. The signal does not seem to change but the link test does.