A building has six floors plus a basement. Each floor is 10,000 square feet and has approximately 50 CATV outlets respectively. There is a single hardline trunk cable installed from the basement…

The tap port is intentionally designed to divert a defined portion of signal power to serve floor outlets, resulting in significantly higher loss equal to the coupling value compared to the through port.

The through leg of a directional coupler is the primary transmission path of the trunk cable; only a small fraction of signal power (determined by the coupling value, typically 10-20 dB below the input) is diverted to the tap port, so the through leg experiences minimal insertion loss - usually 1 to 3 dB - making it the leg with the least signal loss in the system.

A splitter is a separate passive device that divides signal power equally among all output ports, causing approximately 3.5 dB or more of loss per port, and is not a leg of a directional coupler.

'Port' is a generic term for any connection point on a coupler and does not identify a specific signal path; the tap port on a directional coupler experiences more loss than the through port.