We're new to the cruising scene so please excuse our dumb questions. Our home marina has cable to the each pedestal and it seems to work fine but the signal is analog so not very clear. While there are far fewer channels, our over-the-air HDTV antenna pulls in a much clearer picture. Is there a way to improve the signal that the marina is providing? Thanks!
Short answer...no, and I don't think looking for bad wire connections will help. Most of us don't remember how bad analog TV signals look, because we haven't seen them in the US since 2009.
Since then, analog signals are no longer allowed for 'broadcast' -- everything coming over the airwaves now is digital. That's why your picture is better with your antenna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition_in_the_United_States
However, as long as they are not broadcasting into the airwaves, cable companies, hotels and marinas
can still put analog signals on their privately owned wires, although there are very few reasons why they'd want to do this. Analog signals can't be 'compresssed', so they waste a lot of bandwidth.
A marina is a special case however -- they don't want to have to supply cable set-top-boxes to every boater, and they don't want to deliver HDTV content for 'free', and/or they don't want to upgrade old equipment, so they convert channels from digital to analog, which solves these problems (although the picture looks poor).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_headend#Analog_Modulation
Can you connect to a cable wifi hotspot from where you are? A Ubiquity Nanostation can reach one up to a mile or more away if you have a line-of-sight. Then you can 'stream' content from your cable provider through a ROKU or something similar.
https://thenextweb.com/us/2012/05/2...r-massive-wi-fi-sharing-effort-across-the-us/