cable length

[kellie]

I have a very short cable coming into my living room so I can't really move my tv . Can i use a connector to add another piece of cable to make it longer to my dish network receiver?

 

[Fredinva]

Yes, but ONLY if the additional length of cable is RG6.

don't use RG59


fred

 

[StevenD]

And dont forget to use a QUALITY barrel connector. You can buy 3GHz rated connectors from DishStore.net.

 

[Tom Bombadil]

For a relatively short length, the difference between RG6 and RG59 is very small. Over a 10' run, I believe the difference is about 0.35dB. The quality of the connectors and the connection will have more impact than the cable type over most 10'-25' runs (or even further). I've had good quality RG-59 cables that had less signal loss than the same length RG-6 cables, because the RG-59 cables had better connectors.

But buying RG-6 is a safer bet. I noticed last week at Home Depot that every coax cable they sold was now a RG-6.

As far as determining if your cable & barrel connector are sufficient, just read your signal strength off of your current cable, then put in the barrel connector and the extension cable and read the signal strength again. It should only be down 1-3 points. But even if it is down 5-6 points, if you still have a lot of signal, then it may not be a problem.

A couple of years back I was connecting from a surge protector to my receiver using a 6' coax. I had 6 different coax cables on hand so I tried all of them and used the one that rang up the highest signal reading. To my surprise, it was a real nice RG-59, beating out 3 other RG-59's and two RG-6's.

 

[larrystotler]

RG-59 is not rated for voltages of 18 volts and higher. You will burn out the cable if used in a DP install sooner or later. And, it will fail a QC.

 

[Stargazer]

Yes, you will want to make sure that you get a high frequency barrel connector rated at 2.25 to 3 GHZ that is DishPro compatable. A good indication of such is those that have a red or blue color on each side.