396 ES TV amplifier/power supply

[DanM]

I am replacing the TV antenna on our 2004 396ES and I am wondering if anyone knows where Carver located the amplifier/power supply on this model? It should be a straight forward search and discovery mission but if someone would like to share, I'd appreciate it.

[bud37]

Hopefully someone with the same boat can jump in, until, on ours it is not hard wired, but a plug in device which uses the outlet the fridge is plugged into.....appears to be factory, took me a while looking for that thing and Ramsport gave me the tip on the hidden panel and success.

[tomschauer]

It will be a plug in a mentioned. On my 355 its behind the tv in the aft state room with the a/b switch.

[Cliffm]

ours, 2006 36MY was behind the A/C and D/C panels where the salon TV was mounted. A/B selector switch (which is bad) was located in the adjacent salon steps.

There was in Wall outlet inside this cabinet that teh TV was plugged into as well as the amplifier for the Arch TV antenna.

Hope that helps narrow down your search area.

[DanM]

Well the project is done and it was another one of those "They put the part on a piece of wood and built the boat around it" It was behind the Salon TV in the cavity with the salon AC unit. Went from the 15 year old UFO III 10" to a Shakespeare 15" Seawatch. Significant improvement in the reception quality and the number of channels

[bud37]

Good to hear Dan....I am contemplating the same thing....we have the original UFO as well, that I am not sure works well.
If you dont mind, did you just use the existing cable to join the new antenna to the amp etc ?...Thanks .

[tomschauer]

I replaced my UFO 2 years ago with a SeaWatch. The UFO was under the cowling in front of the bridge. I put the Sea Watch on the arch. We get 20-25 channels with it. I pulled the original cable back from under the cowling to where it drops down into the salon (port side behing the storage shelves) cut it and coupled it to a new wire from the Seawatch on the arch. So i reused most of the original cable.

[bud37]

Thanks Tom...did you hook it up to 12volts or back to the 120 ?

[tomschauer]

The amplifier is mounted in my aft cabin behind the TV next to the A/B switch. I just used the 120v transformer to supply the amplifier power. Now that you mention it, I didn't look at the transformer output to see if it is 12VDC, if so, it could be wired to12v. I have a small inverter back there to power the TV and amp.

[DanM]

Hi Bud,
I used the existing cable but cleaned the connecters with a brass wire brush. They cleaned up very nicely but be sure the power to the amp is off so you don't short it out. I connected the amp to power using the supplied 110 wall-wart transformer. Same as the previous installation.