goCoax MoCA 2.5 adapter

[Artex]

This is immensely helpful! I didn't see this documented anywhere for how to read the table. So I wonder if just disconnecting/reconnecting all the coax was what resolved it - which then tells me A) the MoCA supported BAMF splitter is fine, and B) all my coax runs are fine as well, including the older RG59? I am seeing close to 940Mbit using iPerf3 for devices connected to each node.

I feel a little bit silly now and I'm sorry to make everyone go down a rabbit hole with me.

 

[Waltski]

Often disconnecting/reconnecting a fitting will clean up connections. Your stats indicate that your RG59 cable is not causing any speed issues, so you are getting as much speed as the GoCoax 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports can provide. Congratulations!

 

[Artex]

Often disconnecting/reconnecting a fitting will clean up connections. Your stats indicate that your RG59 cable is not causing any speed issues, so you are getting as much speed as the GoCoax 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports can provide. Congratulations!

Well thanks all for your help! I certainly learned a lot through the experience.

 

[Jonavin]

Back in stock. I was able to order a pair just now directly from gocoax.

 

[RogerSC]

Geeze, these are already out of stock at gocoax.com. Guess I was a day late. Sure would like to get 3 of them.

 

[bearnar]

Hi!

I am reaching out to this forum and topic as it seems like both the @gocoax and fellow users/experts is around.

I have a rather big house with 10+ coax outlets, and have 5 GoCoax MoCA adapters that I have tried to get working for some time. However, I have run into issues. To spare you from my hours of troubleshooting, I have narrowed my problem into a simplified case;

I have three points, A, B and C.

A is my office in the ground floor, where my router is, fiber, CATV++ comes in to the house.
B is my living room, ground floor
C is my attic room, first floor.

The most simple schematic I can configure here is:

GoCoax MoCA adapter A -> GoCoaX official splitter (all frequencies) -> wall/cable -> GoCoax MoCA adapter B -> wall/cable -> GoCoax MoCA adapter C.

I am able to get MoCA working from A to B, and from B to C, however, A to C does not work. When A to B are connected and working flawlessly, and I plug in point C, after a while the network shifts from B to C, and since A has the internet/DHCP service, I basically end up with a faulty net everywhere. Likewise, I have tested that B to C are working on its own, with peer-to-peer pinging.

I have tried so much, thinking that perhaps the CATV signal was causing issues, and have used different splitters, filters at all possible places ++

Now, in practice, our house consist of 10+ CATV outlets, where at least two outlets are between A and B, and B and C, and there are also outlets after C in the cable layup (which also do not work from A).

I was thinking that perhaps my problem was signal strength? I have just moved in to this house, so I do not know exactly how the cables are drawn and how much/which cable we are talking about, however the previous owners had to install an amplifier for the CATV signal at point A in order to get a proper signal at point C and onwards. I have confirmed this myself (but we do not use CATV as our TV since we get all we need from internet streams). Since the lower frequencies need to be amped up, would the same be true for the MoCA frequences (I have read that they might not)?

Attached are the signal strengths for B to A (2700 kbps) and B to C (1700kbps) from the adapter in point B, when connected respectivly (when A to B is working, C is not connected, and when B to C is working, A is not connected).

Any help would be greatly appreciated, guys! Let me know if I can provide additional information. Thanks in advance

 

[degrub]

sketch up a diagram with everything (splitters, devices, amps, ISP equipment, etc.) that connects to the coax on it and the paths., please.

What is the cable type - RG6 or RG59 ?
What are the specs / model number/brand on all splitters, amps, etc. ?

 

[bearnar]

Thanks for your reply - yes I assumed some more info was needed. I have done my best. Attached is a sketch/diagram of the house, to the best of my knowledge as I have not pulled the wires myself. See the pictures.

My splitter used at the point A is the GoCoax original one 10-2350MHz OT-DSP-4
My devices are the GoCoax WF-803M
My CATV amp (not connected) is a Fuba IVK 225 47-862MHz
My router is the Unifi Dream Machine Pro

I have little way of knowing the cable type all places, but at least at the end of the cable (at Guest Room 2 from the sketch) it says 59F, so perhaps RG59?

Hope this is helpful?

 

[bearnar]

Adding some more pictures due to the 5 element limit

 

[degrub]

Those pictures of the “furry” cable terminations are horrible and may be one of the reasons the moca is not working. All it takes is one of those shield wire whiskers touching the central conductor and the signal will have a lot of noise on it. Any poor connection with the center conductor in those pass through wall taps may also cause issues. You may want to take the pair of moca modems and connect them starting with the furthest non working wall plate and see if it will sync to the next wall plate.

Seriously, you need a tone generator and detector to trace out the cable runs through the walls and draw a layout map.

You may also have a hidden splitter that is designed for cable tv blocking the moca signal as another issue.

the catv amp will not work with moca.

 

[bearnar]

Thanks for your reply again. Shortly answering your feedback before telling that I have done further progress today;

- Yes, indeed those furry shield wires are probably no good. I left them there intentionally in order not to "alter the crime scene", but I have in the name of further troubleshooting disconnected the entire wire from point C and to the end where that picture was taken.
- Yes, I know that the CATV won't work with MoCA, but you asked me to include it (it has not been connected).

Moving on to today's bitter-sweet "breakthrough" - I managed to get a MoCA signal on points A, B and C (but don't hold your breath..). Two things were done;

1. Removed the splitter in point A, connecting GoCoax adapter directly to wall cable (see picture).
2. Disconnected the wire continuing from point C and onwards, in addition to removing outlet and plugging cable directly into GoCoax adapter (see picture).

The bandwith from A to B increased from 2600kpbs to 3300kpbs (!). Removing the splitter had a large effect.
The bandwith from B to C increased from 1800kpbs to 2000kpbs yielding a small 200 mbit increase between those two points, which I guess the latter "improvement" of disconnecting wire and outlet in point C helped with.

But, the bandwith from A to C..:

As I said, I also managed to get MoCA connection from my internet/ISP connection in point A to point C! However.. a very slow one. Only about 3-400 mbit, which in my case with a gigabit fiber connection would have wanted to at least at that level. See picture.

Now, this is what I currently get with a 100% "pure" connection (no splitters, no outlet connectors, no MoCA connections in between). Is it possible to improve the speed?

What I find a bit strange is that I get 3300mbit from A to B, and 2000mbit from B to C, but from A to C the connection drops exponentially compared to those two numbers. I though the loss in a cable was rather proportional to the length (power loss is proportional to the resistance)?

Also, when connecting node A, B and C together, the bandwith from B to C drops with about 300kbps, from 2000kpbs to 17000kbps, so something interferes there as well.

Help me out if you guys can!

@gocoax ?

 

[bearnar]

Adding the four new speeds (because of picture limit of 5)

 

[degrub]

Glad you got a bump up in sync speed.
The moca modems have a built in amp with a lot of power budget. Removing the gocoax splitter should not have much if any affect.

i suspect there are issues with the cable or you have not found all the connections. To find a bad cable section you will have to connect a modem on each end of each cable section and see what you get.
BTW, connecting into the modem with a not terminated cable may give you random results as the connection is not secure in the modem and the shield is not grounded. Any rf noise in the area from any electrical appliance, wireless AP, etc, will start to play havoc with moca signal.
But anyway, you are going to have to go section by section until you find the issue cable or verify that all the cables are good and it is a connection or hidden catv splitter issue, maybe in the wall !
good project for a weekend. Be very step by step about it.

 

[rawrmcrawrrawr]

First of all, your home seems to be wired not in the traditional way for cable TV. Usually, you'll have 1 coaxial cable coming in from the outside demarcation box into your home. This cable is then hooked up to a splitter and then individual coaxial cables run to each outlet in your home. See the sketch I've attached.

Your home seems to be setup with only 1 coaxial cable acting as a "trunk". Based on the pics you attached, each coaxial outlet in your home is a tap to the coaxial trunk line. Taps by design experience very high loss on the tap outlet, while letting the main "trunk" line through with relatively minor loss. This means that the MOCA signal in your home will get weaker the further away you are from your first adapter (A). This is why the speed from A to C is so low. You're dealing with major loss through a tap port in the room that adapter C is in and each tap between A and C reduces the signal slightly.

With your setup, I don't think you'll ever get gigabit speeds without rewiring your home. However, please try these recommendations to get slightly better performance.

1. You should always use a splitter with the least amount of outlets you need. In your pic, you seem to be using a 4 way splitter when you could get away with using a 2-way splitter. A 4-way suffers -7dB loss on each port while a 2 way splitter will be half that at -3.5dB. Thats why when you wired adapter A straight into the wall, you got slightly higher bit rate.
2. Find every coaxial outlet between room A and C and bypass all the unnecessary wall taps. Re-terminate the two coaxial cables inside and connect them with coaxial couplers. This should reduce your signal loss significantly but also means that you won't be able to use the wall outlets in the bypassed rooms.
3. You'll need to terminate the end of your "trunk" cable with a 75 ohm coaxial terminator. Ideally, you can do this by connecting the coaxial cable from inside the wall directly to your final MOCA adapter.

If I misunderstood anything about your setup, please let me know. Unfortunately, it seems that MOCA is probably not the best choice for your home.

 

[Jonavin]

Gocoax is back in stock if anyone is still looking.

Just received this and will be setting this up tonight, swapping out my pair of ECB6200.

 

[RogerSC]

Gocoax is back in stock if anyone is still looking.

Just received this and will be setting this up tonight, swapping out my pair of ECB6200.

Yep, finally got the 3 I've been trying to get for months now *smile*.

 

[bearnar]

Hi!

I thought I should update you all on the progress made at my "untraditional wired" home! Additional hours have been invested in this, and I have learned that coax cables, signal quality/strength, splitters, outlets and the quality of connections matters to an extent that has been frustrating compared to i.e. ethernet, but the time (and money) invested in all of this luckily paid of.

So, I started with re-terminating the unused wall taps between A and C with couplers (3 of them), as well as trying my best to make the connections as best-practice as possible. The results were immediately shown in the PHY rates, I was now getting close to max speed on all taps!

I then went on trying to connect my rental coax line as well, wanting to have a cabled wireless AP in the other side of the house complex (both for our rental but also for us, giving cabled AP's on both ends of the house). I had to re-terminate a wall tap there as well, however I barely made a working MoCA network from the end of the rental (let's name it R) to the end of my house (C), a weak connection of around 600 mbps. Allthough since the router is present in point A, and the signal from A to R was perfect (3600mbps) and A to C still were about 3500 mpbs, I thought the setup was still okay.

But, ready for even more, I wanted to make use of the tap on my kitchen (K), between A and B as well for a future smart home project. I had not re-terminated this outlet beforehand, but simply by installing a gocoax adapter on this outlet, made point C to weak for the network for some reason (I guess because of R to C being too low it does not matter if A to C works fine).

Removing the R cable showed that by using the kitchen outlet I reduced the quality from A to C down to 2800 mpbs. Generally, this is sufficient for me as C is mainly being used as an AP for wireless network, however I needed R to work as well.

So I decided to split up the MoCA networks, creating a single network from A to R, and from A to C. A to R now has 3600 mbps, and A to C has the said 2800mbps.

Finally, as a test to see my full MoCA potential throughout the house, I re-wired in the tap in point C, and added the wire that goes through to the furthest guestroom (let's name it G) to a final setup. This reduced the quality significantly from A to C (from 2800mpbs to 1400mbps) and gave a weak signal of around 800 mpbs from A to G. However, I am currently on this setup, as I still am above 1gbps on point C, and also have the possibility of connecting TV/ethernet at the furthest point in my coax. I might remove point G again, but in practice I do not think it does anything. Am I right, or have I forgotten about something? Will using a splitter instead of a tap box reduce the loss from i.e. C to G and A to G?

Nevertheless, this is the current end of the journey for me, and I am glad I finally got it working satisfactory. Thanks for your inputs, it really made the difference!

 

[JohnEnglish]

@gocoax

Here's a really weird one for you guys

I bought 2 goCoax adapters late last year. I couldn't get them to connect no matter what I tired. When I hooked them up as shown in the instructions only the first and last LEDs lit up. The middle one didn't. I tested them by hooking them together and all 3 LED's on each adapter lit up.

I just left them hooked up and kept meaning to contact support or post here but I'd forget about them when something else came up. Well, this morning they started working. I have no idea what happened as I haven't changed or done anything to my network. I'm thankful they're now working. However, I'd like to buy some more adapters and I'm wondering if anyone has any idea what happened so I don't run into issues with the new ones.

Here's the network topology (excuse the MS Paint drawing)

The coaxial cables in my house are all RG59. Each one is a single line from the electrical room in the basement to the room. They all work as I have a TV in each room. The cable mode is a Hitron CODA-4582 that is on its own separate cable line that's not connected to any of the cable in my house. The cable company put in an Antronix MVRA902B splitter last year which says it's MOCA compatible. https://www.antronix.com/pdf/DS-1152-AR-MVRA902B.pdf

As you can see I have an Eero Pro connected to the cable modem and a basic gigabit switch connected to the Eero. Everything else is connected by wifi through several Eeros scattered throughout my house.

 

[cruzinhome]

I have two gocoax between my ”server/firewall/nas” room and my main office with our computers and second AP. I have two ECB6200 in my living room and master bedrooms for media use, mostly rokus but also Xbox and ps4..

Is there a tangible benefit for the whole network to upgrade to the Gocoax models for the remaining two?

The Rokus have 10/100 ports and the digital game downloads thru the consoles are not a huge priority. I guess that’s the only thing I can think of that may improve. But I want to make sure I’m not gimping my office by keeping the slower units.

 

[degrub]

If the moca modems are on a dedicated cable runs then no issue.. They will sync at the maximum speed possible.
If the coax is shared among all the adapters, then the higher speed modems may use fewer bands, thus lower sync speed. they will have to do this to communicate with the slower modems. i don't know for sure if the GOCOAX modems will have to drop their use of additional bands with the ECBs present.