LNB Trickery

[Theater Guy]

When I worked for Dish, and I had the dilemma of too many receivers and not enough outputs on the multi-switch, sometimes we would run two lines from the Quad LNB into the switch and the other two to the additional receivers. So we were able to run a total of 6 receivers from only a 4-output switch. We did have to connect only the two outside ports on the LNB to the switch in order to pull in both sats. The two inside ones would go direct to the receivers.

I am curious if this is possible with the DirecTv slimline 5 and a SWM? The SWM had 4 sat inputs and two Flex ports. We had a customer try to hook up this switch himself because he has two dual tuners and one single tuner for a total of 5 lines and we eventually went out there to do it. I was trying to think how we could hook it up without moving lines around.

He had two lines coming off the dish going one way and two the other. I wanted to see if you could just run two lines from the LNB into the switch and leave two lines hooked direct to one of the dual tuners so we wouldnt be re-routing cables all day. Like you can do with Dish.

 

[JosephB]

the SWM must have all four lines connected from the LNB. You can use high frequency splitters between the LNB and the SWM, but the only thing you can connect there is another SWM since it will lock the outputs to particular frequencies.

You can put the switch outside, and splitters outside as well. From what it sounds like he's got all the lines run to the dish, but they go in different directions? I'd just put the switch right at the dish so you can get it connected, and then using splitters you can attach the existing lines as needed.

 

[Bob Nielsen]

The reason you need all four lines is that there are 4 possible switch outputs:

99 odd + 101 odd
99 even + 101 even
103 odd + 119 odd
103 even + 110 even + 119 even

Only one of these conditions can exist on a coax line at a time and all four must be made available to each connected receiver. 99/101 and 103/110/119 can share lines because different frequencies are used.


If you mounted a SWM at the dish (or used a SWM LNB), you could run lines in different directions with the appropriate splitters, as JosephB said.

 

[JosephB]

Let me clarify, you can split the LNB outputs and connect to another SWM switch OR to a legacy switch. However you must connect a switch, you cannot split the LNB outputs and go to a switch and receivers.

If all your receivers are SWM compatible and you have less than 8 tuners, then just putting a SWM immediately after the LNB without a splitter and then using a splitter to combine the runs to the receivers from the SWM is your best shot.