New Contruction cabling question/advice - two room receivers?

[DeuceTrinal]

I am building a house in a rural area where cable tv isn't available and intend to prewire for Directv. I worked in a directv call center a few years ago and seem to remember that the new thing at the time was two room receivers that use RF remotes, where the receiver lives in one room and a second TV just gets a signal feed and an RF remote. Is directv still selling these new?

The house is single story and easy crawlspace access for additional wiring in the future, but I'd like to get close to start.

TV Locations:
Living room (main receiver)
Master Bed (small flat screen up high, no equipment space)
Office
Master Bath (in wall 13" flat screen, no equipment room)
Guest bed (could share signal with office/bath)

Here's my tentative plan so far - we don't plan on HD programming, but possibly DVR in the main room. What I was hoping to do was wire for two-room receivers, with a receiver in the living room feeding the master bed, and a receiver in the office feeding the guest bed/his bath (shouldn't need to be independent, can just carry the RF remote, should almost never get used simultaneously, trying to avoid a third receiver.) I'd pull 2 lines from the dish location to the living room and the office, and pull lines from there to the master bed/bath etc.

This is a small house I'm wiring myself, and I don't have much experience with satellite. Should I pull home runs straight to receiver locations? Or do I pull to a mechanical closet and use Diplexers or the like to distribute?

Any help or suggestion are VERY welcome, I've been trying to research on my own but information is so varied I figured I come to the guys who know what they are doing. =)

 

[NiFi]

Dish has the dual tuner receivers with the RF remote and backfeed, not DTV.
You will need a receiver at every location if you want to watch different programming at each. ( for Direct TV )

 

[Claude Greiner]

http://www.dishretailer.com/newhouse.htm

 

[Joe Diamond]

Make it easy,

Verify line of sight (LOS) before proceeding.

Get dual cable with Cat 5.( or 6).........homerun each room to a disrtibution box near the building ground. Get a DTV mast and plan a dish location location.

Enter your new zip code in an active DTV receiver system setup or go to their site.

Plan where the dish must be and wire two double cables to the same box. Use dual with ground or run a pull wire and let the DTV guy provide the dual with ground.

The installer will be clad to only have to put fittings on the cab;e ends but may not have the correct box plates.

Joe

 

[satdogs]

DTV 5 lnb systems call for a copper center conductor coax. Max cable runs 100'. Keep this in mind before you buy cable.

 

[timothymallon]

Having just done a home remodel in the past year I think I may be of some help. My first and foremost recommendation is to make sure that whatever you decide to go with gives you the flexibility to change in the future. I recommend that you pick a central location within your house to use as a "wiring closet". Wiring closets are used in commercial buildings for telephone and computer network patches between rooms on that floor and other floors. I have a split level home with a closet underneath the staircase on the lower floor. I mounted two 24"x24" metal boxes within the wall of that closet and used one for my telephone and computer network wiring patches and the other for my coax cable patches. From that closet I have direct runs to each room in my house and can patch in just about any configuration I want. All cables are labeled by different color stripes and a chart telling me which colors go where.

Now for your DirecTV question. If I understand your original post, you want to run your dish into your receiver and then parallel your receiver coax output to all of your televisions, using the same receiver for each and thus removing the possibility of watching seperate satellite programming on multilple televisions. This can be done using my recommendation of the wiring closet, but you will need to run two coax cables to the room where the receiver is going to be located (one for the dish and one for the output of the receiver). Split the output of the receiver at the back of the receiver by two and send one line back to your wiring closet. Then use a four way splitter in your wiring closet to branch off to your other rooms.

By using the wiring closet model, you can also change your system configuration in the future. At the present time, the current D* dish will allow you to run a total of 4 receivers off of the dish. You could run your 4 cables from your dish to your closet, then use barrel connectors to patch in your rooms to your dish. If you need more than 4 rooms, you will need to install a multiswitch in your closet, which will need your 4 inputs from your dish and will branch off into as many outputs as the switch provides.

I've got to run, but just some quick things. Make sure that you use RG-6 quad shielded coax with solid copper center conductor. The receivers need the solid copper and the quad shield helps reject rf interference. Run coax for an OTA antenna and for cable company interfaces just in case in the future. This gives you maximum flexibility to change your setup as you see fit. Finally, run a telephone line with each coax to each room and use CAT5E UTP. You get a much cleaner signal that way. I hope all of this helps.

Tim

 

[lou_do]

I have spent the last two days wiring my house with CAT 6 wiring, and plenty of it. I sure wish I would have had it done when I had the house built 2 years ago, it would have been a lot easier than all the wall fishing I had to do.

One of the reasons I said plenty of CAT 6, is beside using it to network your house, with all of the new types of baluns out there you can send audio or video signals anywhere in your house using CAT 5e or CAT 6. here are a couple of examples of what I am doing.

1. Taking the HD output from my H20 or HR20 and sending it to additional TV in the house. The balun converts the Y Pb Pr signals to go down 3 Cat 6 pairs. I use an Audio Balun to convert the audio into 2 pairs of another CAT 6 cable. With the use of baluns on each side of the line I can send HD signals anywhere in the house by plugging jumpers in my patch panel.

2. I take the audio signal from my computer, from a radio station, 1600 miles away, send it to an audio balun, through the CAT 6 wiring to the Surround Sound receiver, in the great room.

3. Connecting my HR20 to the Internet.

As time goes on there will be many more things you can do with CAT 5 or CAT 6 wiring. Some rooms I have 4 runs going back to the patch panel, and others only two.

 

[Todd Humphrey]

Remember that DTV DVRs take two coaxs each. A dish with a 4 port LNB can only supply signal to two DVRs or four standard receivers. You should always run two coaxes to every major TV location where you think might use a DVR. DISH Network can work from one coax, but there are situations where even they need to switch to a two coax system.

 

[ticket]

Remember that DTV DVRs take two coaxs each .... not true
look at DirecTV's newest signal distribution method.
http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=78249

 

[Stargazer]

I prewired most of a house that I built for myself and its a fairly large one. The downstairs livingroom and master bedroom gets three coax wires plus a phone wire on wall plates and a receptacle in the center of the wall on each side in case I want to move a television/entertainment center to that location. One spot that I think the television will be most of the time in the livingroom got five coax wires because its in between two large windows that looks down onto the field and I can see a bigscreen that would sit there from the master bedroom.

All the wires go upstairs to one location where I can hook them together to go to another and most can be accessed in the basement where a wire can be replaced. Did not run CAT-5 because I do not think high speed internet will be available anytime soon but the phone wires can be easily replaced with CAT-5 through those holes. I have three coax connections at each side of the wall consisting of two wall plates - one having two coax connections and the other with a coax and telephone connection. The reason for three coax connections is for the dual tuner receivers. I can have two wires running from satellite dish to the receiver then use the third to backfeed to other rooms throughout the house. In case I choose to have more than one dual tuner satellite receiver I can use DPP to seperate the two wires into four tuners and in case of three dual tuner receivers I can use DPP to seperate the three wires into six tuners and use diplexers. That should cover me very well with what I may need in the future unless they come out with a new type of cable/technology that replaces RG-6 and ethernet (fiber?)

I am on my second roll of RG-6 coax already (used over 1,000 feet of coax) not counting phone wire used and I am not done wiring the house up. I thought I was using a lot of cable but Claude is using over 22,000 feet of coax in his. Wow thats a lot of wire!