[damien c]

Originally Posted by Chris

Regarding the VM coaxial cable - don't waste your money on RG6, f-plugs and a crimper. Satellite-grade coax with moulded f-plugs on either end will do the trick nicely and will save you the time and expense of crimping yourself.

However, to reiterate Rob's warning, be careful if you are doing DIY on your VM cabling. It is possible to mess the service up by changing your cable length, using substandard cable or not attaching the f-plugs correctly.

To be honest what you said is wrong, sorry to say as a Ex-Installer for the Virgin Tv and Broadband you do need to use RG6 and the Crimping tool's for the F connector's.

The reason is that the Sky cable will cause issue's with the signal noise on the cable that is required, the Sky type cable and normal Aerial cable is substandard for Virgin service's, and if you use it and have a fault and a engineer come's out and determine's that the fault lies, with the cable then you will have to pay for a new cable etc as far as I am aware.

The reason that Virgin would rather have you phone them and arrange a engineer to fit a new point, is because of the cable aswell as the Attenuator's or Simulator's that could be required.

Not only as what I have said above but, the connector's are also of a higher quality aswell and, the cable has more to it than just a simple stinger it has the coax core aswell as the metal braiding around the outside of the coax which also transfer's, info etc and the Sky cable is just not good enough to do it.

I know this because I bought a Monster Power Center and it came with some cable's, with F's on the end and I tried them and they were dropping the level's on the box but as soon as I put the normal RG6 cable back on it the level were fine again and no longer, had any stuttering or issue's when watching film's or using the broadband.

Hence why I never tell people to do the cable extension's themselve's unless they can get hold of the RG6 and connector's, the cable is not that expensive I think it is about £50 for about 200m and the F's are about £10 for a pack of 50, the Cable Stripper Tool is about £20 and the Crimper is about £35, not to expensive really considering that will allow you to make potentially 25 cable's.

As for the speaker cable it would be just normal audio speaker cable, but I would invest in some decent cable for a crisper sound quality.

The optical cable would just be a normal Toslink cable, so that is fine speaker cable is as above.