Okay, here's the long answer--forgive any longwindedness but I want to give you or anyone else reading a grasp of the situation.
For digital cable, every channel you see and tune to is a "virtual" channel. Each virtual chennel seems discrete to the end-user, but it's likley multiplexed with many other chanels onto the "physical" channel, which is a slice of the Radio frequency spectrum allocated to CableTV. There are approximatly 158 physical cable channels (most providers use, at most, 140 of those), and a most multiplex multiple "virtual" chanels onto a single physical channel. I've seen anywhere between no virtual channels and 10 virtual channels on a single physical channel. As such, if a physical channel is coming in bad, you may not notice it, or, you may have 10 channels all over the dial that come in shitty. Thus, to the layperson, it may seem that there's no reason or rhyme why certain channels may be bad, but they could all be on the same physical channel.
In my setup, I'm running an HDHomerun Prime. It's basically a little box that you plug your cable into, plug a Cat-6 network cable into it and the other end into your router, and plug a cablecard M into it. It tunes the station you want on one of it's 3 channel tuners, and seds the signal into you home network. You install a program onto each PC that you want to watch TV on and it catches the signal over your home network and pipes the signal into Windows Media Center. It also comes with some diagnostic utilities; one of which displays what's going on with each physcial channel. It shows the channel's signal strength, signal quality, symbol strength (basically, how much usable vs. non-usable information over the last second), and which virtual channels are multiplexed onto the physical channel. For the most part, all of my channels have good to excellent strength, and excellent quality. The exceptions are physical channels 113-115, which is between about 725 and 745MHz. Those have adequate to good signal strength (other station with the same signal strength come in fine), and shitty quality. On those channels, 2 have no virtual channels, one has a bunch of SD movie stations, and one has both Fox Soccer SD and HD on it.
Now, from the wall jack I'm using, the cable runs through a surge suppressor, through a splitter, where one part of the signal goes to my cable modem, the other goes to my HDHomerun. In troubleshoot, i've bypassed the splitter, with no improvement from the utility tests to the "visual" test by tuning the channels. I have yet to try to bypass the surge supressor to isolate it, butace the jack is bhind a heavy shelf/case that contains a shit-ton of my HTPC and network equipment (moving it alone without unhooling everything is inviting disaster). And even if I test the surge suppressor bypass I wan to try my apaartment's other jack to make sure it's not a problem with the jack.
Knowing what I know about RF, If I throw a booster on it for those channels it will just be boosting a shitty signal. I want to verify that nothing in my apartment proper (Surge supressor or jacks) is causing the shitty signal in that frequency range. Only after that will i contact the cable company to verify their signal on their end. If they're good, then it's the apartment's witing from my apartment to the cable company's junction box, and if I complain to them, I want to make sure all of my ducks are in a row because I know they would balk at the cost of rewiring everything from my apartment jacks out to the junction box.
Short answer: only a couple of stations are bad and the problem is not signal strength, it's signal quality. I suspect bad wiring between my apartment and the cable junction box but I want to make certain that it's not an issue in my apartment before I get the cable company to check their end, and that it's neither my gear nor the cable company before I attempt to get my apartment to fix it because I know they'll resist tooth and claw.
Anyhow, back to soccer.
