A few Superdish questions

[Forward]

1) Am I correct in assuming that for a two receiver setup I will need only two cables from the Superdish? In other words, I assume the switches are built in.

2) Suppose at some point I decide to get a two tuner DVR. Will I need a third cable from the Superdish?

3) I intend to replace an old receiver with an 811 when it becomes available. By buying the 811, Will I get the Superdish free even without signing up for either the AT50 pack for a year or the HD pack for a year? I will not be connecting the 811 to an HD ready TV yet, so I don't need the HD pack. (I just like the feature pack on the 811, and I'd like to get the OTA digital stations, as the pictures are much better than their analog counterparts even in SD, judging from my 6000.) I probably wouldn't have any problem committing to AT50 (or 100 or 150) for a year, but I'm just curious about this.

4) I still have big concerns about my site, and about what a "professional" installer will do (or not do). (No offense meant to those of you installers who really are professionals.) I'm about convinced that the only viable location is from my detached garage roof or from a pole (at least a 6 footer) right next to the garage. There's a sidewalk between that location and my house, so there's no way the cables can be trenched underground. Has anyone seen what installers do in such a case? I can and have created overhead drops in previous satellite installations; will installers do so? Would that be considered a special installation so that it's no longer free? Frankly, if that's the case I'll be ticked if I can't twist the guy's arm to just leave the SuperDish there and "say" it was installed. Or maybe he could install and aim it and I could do the cabling work? It would just grate me to have to pay a lot for an installer to do cabling that I'm perfectly capable of doing, and have done numerous times before. There shouldn't even be any internal switches to worry about with a two receiver installation.

5) Last question. Are Superdish and the 811 both scheduled to become available on 11/1?

 

[Tom488]

1) Switches are NOT built in. You will need three cables. You can mount your switch adjacent to the dish, however, which would only require two cables coming into the house. This isn't exactly preferred, and if you were to do this, at least put the switch in a waterproof enclosure. (Dish says the switches are rated for outdoor use, but...)

2) Today (or immediately after you get a SuperDish), yes, you'll need three cables from the SWITCH to your receivers - two to the 2-tuner, and one to the single-tuner. Tomorrow (meaning next year, when the DP+44 switch is available), you'll be able to feed a dual-tuner receiver with a single cable, utilizing an adapter at the receiver end to split out into the two receiver inputs.

3) Currently, no. The deal for free SuperDish is a 1 year commitment to AT50 (or better), and either locals or the HD pak. This is not to say there won't be bundles that include both an 811 and a SuperDish - but those haven't been announced yet, and no one knows the price of such a bundle.

4) It's not that tough to run conduit underneath the sidewalk - you just dig a hole on either side, then hammer the conduit through the dirt underneath the sidewalk. Beyond that, I don't know what an installer would or would not do. It sounds like your best bet is to have him mount and aim the dish, and you handle the wiring.

5) So they say...

 

[Forward]

Thanks for the answers. I'm disappointed to hear about the need for an external switch. That suggests the engineers didn't have enough time. Building the switches into the twin LNBFs on the 500 was a great advance. You can bet that within the next 18 months this will change, but right now it's all about rollout.

I hadn't thought about slamming conduit under a walk. Interesting idea.

 

[Stargazer]

This reminds me of when the Dish 500 first came out. It had two seperate lnbf's each with two outputs that fed to two sw-21 switches that would then go to two receivers (unless you got the two seperate lnbf's with just one output for one receiver). One lnbf would be pointing at 110 and the other at 119. Later they came out with the twin in which had the switch built in.

Perhaps the same will follow through with the SuperDish in that they will provide an lnbf with the switch built in. I figure they will try to use the old twin lnbf off of your Dish 500 (given it is a DishPro) and then add the switch and lnbf for 105 to it to save some money.

I wonder if one could make it a legacy dish and still make it work if you used a legacy twin and a different lnbf that is adaptable to 105?

Also, when the DP+44 comes out next year, you will be able to use one of the two outputs for the dual tuner by putting the one of those two wires on a special diplexer in the house at the receiver instead of adding a third wire to do that, unless you was going to add a dual-tuner receiver to the ones you have now and currently have two tuners (a 721 or two single tuner receivers).

 

[Mike500]

"I wonder if one could make it a legacy dish and still make it work if you used a legacy twin and a different lnbf that is adaptable to 105?"

It will depend on 105 support by both hardware and software. There are dual lnbs, (nonDishPro, horozontal/vertical voltage switched) on the market with dishes that will work. These are the standard ku-fss lnb's used in the rest of the world outside of the US.

The main question is whether the software written by dish would provide support. As I heard, I would think, Not!

 

[Stargazer]

That's what I was thinking and afraid of. Why shouldn't they make it work with legacy as well? I would not think you would have to have DishPro to receive the signal and watch the channels at that slot, but I suppose that would be the case if you was only receiving 105 and that they would need to support the legacy switching as well.