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I want to prewire my house for DSS (1 Viewer)

Bill Kane

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The question is fishing cables in an existing house's living room wall for the future.

I plan to have my hi-fi store tech go into the attic to wire up my surrounds. While he's there, I cud prewire for satellite later. But I dont plan on looking at HDTVs for a year.

For satellite, I prefer Dish to DTV. As I understand it, Dish/Echostar requires two dishes, one for the HD bird, yes? (But Echostar is spozed to put up a new sat in the near future, right? and that might mean just one dish?

Anyway, to prewire from the attic into the house, how many runs of RG6 -- 4 or 6. And do I want RG6 Quad. Do installers use RG59? Are all of these cables terminated with F connectors?

(edit: I dont think DSS is the correct term in my header, but you get the idea)
 

Mark Rogo

Grip
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Aug 31, 1999
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DBS would've been a close to perfect term, but no matter at all :).

I would go for six runs to the roof. Eventually, you may need 3 different LNBs and two cables to each one. I would buy the best RG-6 that is spec-ed for satellite. Also, you might consider running one more wire for an antenna if you can get locals via antenna (I'm thinking digital/HD here, not regular old analog OTA).

Mark
 

Robert_J

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Eventually, you may need 3 different LNBs and two cables to each one.
Running as many cables as possible is a good thing but they may not be required in the future. Dish has a new dish type called DishPro. It uses stacked LNB's so their is only 1 coax connection to each LNB. They also have the new SW34 switch. One input from each of the three LNB's and outputs to four receivers. Also, multiple SW34's can be daisy chained together. There is no announcement when this will be available but there are some pictures of wiring diagrams are available at www.dishretailer.com .
-Robert
 

Bill Kane

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Mark, Robert, thx.

I'll be checking the dbsforum, too, along the way so hopefully when I get there I won't be drafting one o' those "Help..." posts.

Shouldnt be difficult since I'm only going for one video monitor, one STB w/ OTA module, and mebbe PVR501 will be upgraded by then.

bill
 

Ryan Wright

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Jul 30, 2000
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I only see a need for a max of 3 runs to the roof. 2 for dish and 1 for antenna. If you need more than 2 receivers, you don't add extra dishes, you go with one of the products listed at http://www.smarthome.com/dss.html, such as this 3x8 multi-switch. You can cascade them for up to 40 receivers on a single dish. At $130 per 8 receivers, it's pretty darn cheap.
As for the runs to the rest of the house, typical structured wiring spec calls for 2 RG6 per room. I ran 4. Two for satellite, one for cable/antenna/whatever, and one extra. In my HT/Living room, I ran 12 - 6 on one side of the room and 6 on the other, as well as enough audio to support 24 signals (12 stereo), and at least 15 runs of cat5 for phone, networking, & security applications.
 

Bob McElfresh

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May 22, 1999
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I had the installer run dual RG6 from the roof even for 1 receiver and ran it to a corner of a central bedroom.

From this central location, I ran dual runs of RG6 to each room and dual runs of Cat5 network cable in a "star" pattern.

Later, I found some "Smart Home" cable that has dual RG6 and dual Cat5 cable in 1 bundle.

At this central location I also ran my CATV feed. Now it's a simple matter of a splitter/jumpers to run the DBS signal to any room and CATV. This is also where I mounted my network router.

I'm with Ryan on this one: when in doubt - run extra. The wire is cheap compared to the cost/hassle of running the wire.
 

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