Well, from what I've been told, the ups and surge protectors are pretty worthless as far as protecting devices, especially lower voltage surges. They are not strong enough to blow/trip, but the HDMI boards are fragile enough to blow. Also Charter cable tech told me that the surge protectors that have coax in/out have issues with the STB/cable, as their service requires two way communication and they interfere with that. I'd still like to try one to see if the service works. But I don't believe this is isolating anything. And, an AC surge that is trying to find ground will still 'see' the coax as an easy route out the HDMI.
I agree with your second point too, or at least I did before this 'theory' of coax being the easiest source of grounding. I'm told that electricity, like water, uses the path of least resistance, and that is very often times a source of coax, as it is a great grounding source. If instead of running the STB HDMI into my receiver, I ran it into my TV, if theory proves true, then my TV would suffer the surge. It's following the coax. The ONLY way I think I can truly isolate the coax, is with using either component cables or fibre optic. But all this would do is isolate the coax from my receiver. The surge could still 'sniff' out the coax via the STB, but of course I could care less if the STB takes the surge. It won't blow though, since it wouldn't be taking it through any HDMI boards. So if I do use component or fibre optic, any surge would have to find the next path of least resistance, wherever that might be. All that said, its just a THEORY.
So I can do two things. isolate with a non hdmi cable. and I can beef up my home ground, which I'm currently researching. I have 3 new 8' rods, but I still need to figure out how to drive them into the ground, and what type of cable/wire to use to connect them to eachother, and how to connect to the box.
