Dish Network long cable run

[rfguy]

Hello
New to site. Have a question. I have a installation where the Dish network antenna (3 LNB) standard size needs to be located 300 ft from the receiver. I have a Super Buddy meter I have been using to make measurements. The site is located on the Pacific coast around Lat 47d. I get good strong signal with about 50 ft RG-6 quad SCC. Of course when I add the other 250 ft the signal -66. Loss is 20 db in the 250 ft length. I added an in line 20db amp which restores signal loss but I believe the reactive properties of the cable are causing signal distortion because receiver does not see a signal. IRD # seems to stay the same. I don't have a lot of knowledge with the Dish system so some help would be appreciated. One question is how much the use a larger cable would help like RG-11 or a 75 ohm version of 1/2 inch heliax. The loss at 950Mhz is going to be much less than 2100Mhz so if the amp does not equalize this could be part of the problem?? Thanks for any ideas.

 

[chiodo]

I think you answered your own question. RG11 Heliax would improve your signal loss problem greatly. It's very expensive stuff. I suggest Coaxial Cables and RF Components | MPD Digital RF Coaxial Cables or even look at

Home - Shireen for RG11.



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[HipKat]

chiodo is right about RG11, although I did have a customer in Ohio that used about 300' of RG11 for his Hopper. dbm's were still a little high - right at 50, but everything worked

 

[nelson61]

Don't know the specs for the Holland amp but for most of the amps, the 20 db boost is at one end of the frequency range with the other end having a significantly lower amplification.
I've use RG11 with amps on comparable runs and it gives it that extra boost required for a stable signal over the complete range.

 

[rfguy]

Don't know the specs for the Holland amp but for most of the amps, the 20 db boost is at one end of the frequency range with the other end having a significantly lower amplification.
I've use RG11 with amps on comparable runs and it gives it that extra boost required for a stable signal over the complete range.

Thank you to all for responses. This line amp which is 20db did restore the signal loss maybe a couple db lower on the 129LNB. I believe 129 is used for HD. Like I said the reason it did not work i think is distortion caused by the long run of RG6. Before I spend $100+ on 300ft of RG-11, I wanted to be a little more confident I was not going to get the same result. RG-11 has RG-6 beat by only 2 db/100 at 2Ghz. If there have been folks that have used 300ft of RG-11 with or without in line amp with success, I guess that is good enough to take the leap.

 

[nelson61]

You will more than double the signal -3 db for doubling.

Only downside I have seen is slow response on channel switching which I guessed was related to low voltage on the old legacy lnbs I was using at that time .

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[Claude Greiner]

The inline amps do nothing really.

Your biggest issue is getting the switch commands back to the switch.

RG11 basically cuts the signal loss in half and can do double the distance of RG6.

The other thing that works is if you get (3) Dish pro LNB’s and install them on your dish and run separate lines for 110/119/129 or 61.5/72.

Run 2/3 separate cables from the dish and locate the switch within 50 feet of the receiver.

Besides switch commands, one common problem on legacy systems using 14/18 volt switching would be voltage drop in the cable and there would not be enough voltage to get the LNB to switch polarities. Not so much of an issue today using dishpro technology as it’s only using 20 volts and is more tolerant due to voltage drop.

Just do yourself a favor and stay away from the line powered inline amps. Anything with an external power supply is good.

But again signal loss is generally not an issue. It’s mostly voltage drop, and getting switch commands back up the coax

 

[Claude Greiner]

And if you run separate lines from the LNB, you can usually get away with RG6 instead of RG11

I have done many commercial installs. I did a 29 story federal building with 6 trunk cables and a 6 way tap on each floor for Directv.

I did it all with RG6, at a cost of less than $100 for the wire and fittings.

If I had done RG11 I would have needed 6 spools to pull the trunks at a cost of $900. Then at each floor would have required 12 fittings at $4 each would have run me almost $1500.

That’s not even counting the Trunk amps required every 3 floors which added roughly another 100 fittings.

Even though this was for the GSA, I still had to keep the pricing under their budget of $10,000 which included the dish, launch amp, taps, switches, splitters, cable and labor

 

[the mack]

I had a 400 foot run of rg6 and the only way it would switch properly was to use a dpp44 power Inserter. then I noticed the tuner 2 signal was low so I installed a sonora amp and it brought the tuner 2 signal back up. it worked fine for years.
I ended up going to a dpp44 switch and individual lnb's and found a good deal on rg11 so I replaced the rg6.