Sort of an MDU

[Sailor553]

Howdy,

Am new here and am in need of some assistance with a large home that is under construction.

I am about to pre-wire a large nine bedroom home. CATV is not available so, the only options available are Direct or Dish.

What is the best and most cost effective method for distributing a HD and foreign satellite signal to up to 19-TVs?

Near as I can tell, the only way to distribute Dish is via a battery of cascaded DPP44 switches.

Along the same lines, can I share DVRs?

TIA

[doctor j]

Final answer depends on type of TV's , goal of viewing ,usage of DVR's etc.
An MDU MFH-2 system can easily distribute signals to 19 TV's. If all DVR's HD or SD you would need 38 "tuner" capacity. An FMH chassis with 5 SMW-8 units would provide capacity for 40 tuners. Cost in basic hardware for distribution would be around $2000 and tuners if HD-DVR's another $3800.

No sharing or central remote control in this type arrangement. Others can speak about home theater type options with HR-21 PRO units in a central location and distributed video to the TV's. Costs still high. Each HR-21PRO $600. A bundle for the remote system and video switching.

Questions about content can point one to one service or another. My huge bias based on about of usable HD content and especially sports HD makes it a hands down nod to Directv. I know little about Dish but don't see it anywhere close to my needs. My opinion about distribution of Dish would be mush less sophisticated and less expandability. No technical basis however.

Options can be overwhelming. Pick basic needs and focus on that.

Doctor j

[AntAltMike]

If someone can afford a nine bedroom house, he can afford to have both DirecTV and DISH. I set up a house that had 28 wallplates in it with just three DirecTV receivers and modulators to "save money", like this guy needed to save money. He was a defense contractor: they guy who sells the $700 hammers and $100 Allen wrenches. It was dumb of him to scrimp.

I also installed some DirecTV receivers for the Havana cigar smoker who got drafted just after Sam Bowie. His "personal assistant" (back when I did residential, I had too many customers with personal assistants) decided to save $5 a month by having the kitchen and den share the same Sony A50. That arrangement lasted about two weeks.

Obviously, DirecTV has the most HDTV and sports, so you might benefit from taking a few DISH network foreign channels, which are going to be standard definition anyway, and modulating them to UHF channels. You might find that having a couple of DISH receivers fixed on, say Al Jazeera or the like, and maybe one or two agile ones with UHF remote controls, covers your customer's foreign programming needs. DISH DPP technology can support two tuners in one dual tuner receiver, but it may be impractical to try to export one of the tuner's outputs to a second room.

[Sailor553]

Thanks Doc...

I did find out that this customer already has DISH at their primary home. I suspect they will follow suit here. I do know that each TV will be new: 3-large Plasma and the rest LCD. All but two will be wall hangers. All the plasmas will get 5:1 surround and one will be cabled for XBox, etc. This is Texas...sports are always an issue.

I hate to admit it but, it looks like I'll be stringing a bunch of DPP44s together.

I hate un-tidy.:nono2:

[AntAltMike]

....it looks like I'll be stringing a bunch of DPP44s together.

I hate un-tidy.:nono2:

I got burned stringing DP34s at Johns Hopkins University's language lab. I reconfigured with dedicated single LNBs, 17 dB inline amps and power inserters, and then I feed them into eight way splitters, so when something malfunctions, I dont have to guess what it was. I'll be adding nine more receivers to that system this weekend.

[Sailor553]

Mike,

Are you saying that you dedicated 17-single LNBs? How? Or combos of dishes and LNBs?

How did you get burned by stringing DPP34s?

Perhaps there is an non-DISH switch/amp?

[AntAltMike]

No, I had three single LNBs targeting 61.5, 110 and 119. That way, the switch couldn't call for the wrong satellite because the switch inputs were hardwired to fixed LNBs. Then I replaced 61.5 with 121, and then 121 with 118.7 as programming migration warranted.

The downleads from the dish antennas to the distribution point are over 100 feet long, so I put Channel Master 17dB inline amps and dedicated 18 volt power inserters there to compensate for the downlead loss as well as the splitter loss that folows.

The problem I had troubleshooting individual switches is that each switch gets its signal from the switch above it, but curiously the "through" amplifiers in the DP34s get their voltage from the switch below it, so if the ports on a DP34 are not outputting one of the satellites, I don't know if it is because the switch above it is defective, or the problem switch itself is not sourcing the 18 volts to power the "through" port above it. It was much easier to use three 8-way splitters on the three amplified, powered downleads and to connect the DP34s directly to those splitters.

What foeign language channels does this customer need?