Home Network Basis: Transmission Environments and Wired/Wireless Protocols

3.3. Splitters

Splitters are used at coaxial cable branch points where the even distribution of power and impedance match are both important. There are power splitters with a different number of output ports. However, all power splitters are built upon the basic one-to-two power splitter component. A one-to-four power splitter/combiner is made by cascading three one-to-two power splitters together (Figure 3.3). Inside a one-to-four power splitter, output ports of the first one-to-two splitter are connected to input ports of two other one-to-two splitters resulting in a total of four external output ports. Using this cascading method, the signal can be evenly distributed among a number of output ports while maintaining impedance matching at all ...