No one touched on the the rational behind the 75-ohm termination of unused ports. Some think it's for weatherproofing, some aesthetics. The coax in your satellite system is a unbalanced transmission line. The impedance of the connectors, coax cable, splitters, etc. in the system is 75 ohms. If you inject an AC voltage into a transmission line, there are reflections anywhere there are changes in impedance. The bigger the difference in impedance, the bigger the reflection. An open port on a splitter causes a reflection back into the system. Placing a 75-ohm terminator on the port causes the signal to be "absorbed" by the load of the 75-ohm resistor located in the cap of the 75-ohm terminator.
Now, back in the days of analog cable, reflections would be easy to detect by the ghosting of the video channels. In the digital realm and MOCA, reflections can cause excessive errors or dropouts.
I am surprised that your terminator was just a wire shorted against the outside cap, BD. The one I pulled apart decades ago had a very small 1/8 or 1/16 W resistor soldered to the cap with the other lead of the resistor as the pin (or "stinger") of the terminator. A dead short would generate a reflection just like an open circuit.
I my case of the twin RG6U w/ground cables coming down the side of my house from my Dish 1000.4 to a twin ground block (and then off to my ViP 722k and 211k) I had asked on how Dish would install the Dish 1000.2 and Solo Hub, my concern being what they would do with the unused half of the twin coax. Since the 2nd output from the Hybrid LNBf won't be powered I hope it won't be attempting to transmit a signal down the used cable and a passive "drop cap" will suffice to protect the coax from moisture intrusion.
Are there any detailed install instructions if we decide to install it ourselves ?
