Advice needed - replacing MS with some other solution (SWM?)

[OverThereTooMuch]

Condo has a single LNB dish on the roof. All units have one wire coming from a multiswitch into their unit. There's another wire to each unit that's used by the cable company (for HS internet). I believe there's a 16 port MS in the building cabinet today (can't get in there right now to confirm).

I can't put a 5 LNB dish on my deck (no LOS). So if I want HD & DTV, I'll have to get the HOA to allow me to upgrade the dish + infrastructure.


So I thought about adding 2 SWM's to replace the MS. I believe you can connect 2 SWM's in parallel, so that you'd still have support for 16 tuners (I don't know how to do it, but I believe it's technically possible). The problem though is that the SWM's only support a cable run of 200ft. I'm pretty sure that some of the runs to the other end of the building would be longer than this (though there's no way I could verify, since I don't know how the cables are routed).

The complex is pretty small (I think 10 buildings total, with 12-16 units per building). We don't have an operator that runs this. We just have the equipment that the builder installed. That single LNB dish is still sitting up there :)

Is there something similar to the SWM that's only available to MDU installers that would work in a situation like this? There must be much larger buildings than this that have > 200' cable runs. Or am I completely boned because the building is too big for an SWM, but not big enough for the higher end equipment?

[AntAltMike]

The SWMs have been shown to support single receivers at distances of 400 feet, but if you start splitting the signal, you will probably lose around 40 to 50 feet of nominal, maximum length per 2-way split, because a 2-way splitter will probably lose between 4 and 5dB at 1800 MHz. You can probably extend that by another hundred feet or more with a Sonora inline amplifier that is specially designed to work in SWM systems.

There are SWM chassis that can support two, four or 6 SWMs, but they are very expensive. They only use four input ports to source 99/101/103/110/119, so 12 "regular" multiswitch ports would remain. I think the wholesale price on an FMC6 is still over $500.

But remember, if anything goes wrong, you are going to be the guy with the egg on his face, and probably the guy who will have to arrange and pay for a "professional" repair that might not go so smoothly, since most residential installers called out to service it would look at it and say, "What in hell is all that?".

[OverThereTooMuch]

Thanks for the info on the longer runs.

But remember, if anything goes wrong, you are going to be the guy with the egg on his face, and probably the guy who will have to arrange and pay for a "professional" repair that might not go so smoothly, since most residential installers called out to service it would look at it and say, "What in hell is all that?".Yeah...that's a really great point. So I guess 2 SWM's would be a better choice than some specalized equipment, but it'll still be a PITA to deal with.

Dang.

[AntAltMike]

You'll need 2 SWMs to support nine to sixteen tuners. The only question is how you choose to source them. You can put splitters on each LNB downlead and split each downlead three ways, to independently support each SWM and the multiswitch, or you can connect each SWM to four ports of the multiswitch, therefore expending half of them, or you can buy a 2, 4, or 6 SWM chassis, which has "through" ports on it, and connect the inout ports of the SWM chassis to the LNBs, and the output through ports to a 2 (or 4) input multiswitch.

I'm not sure if the 2, 4, and 6 input SWM modules can be powered through the tuner coaxes, so you might have to arrange for powering of those chassis through a coax dedicated to that purpose.

Last year, I "pre-installed" some specialty destacking hardware at a condo that has two stacked Ku band trinklines, Sat A and Sat B/C. I cleverly multiplexed everything using Hughes 2x1 tone switches and left a clearly written instruction for the DirecTV installer to just connect the receivers to the wallplates, which I had pretested, then go into the "hidden" set-up service menu and change the receivers to "stacked LNB". The note also said to call me before he began.

A few days later, I got a call from the installation tech, whio said he couldn't make the receivers operate. I asked him if he had found the note I left with my phone number on it, or if he just got my number from the customer. He said he found the note before he began the installation, but he didn't understand the circuitry I had devised, so he pulled it all out before he installed the receivers, and now they don't work. That is what you are looking at unless you can pre-arrange with a company that is familiar with SWM technology before you try anything any more complicated than connecting the two SWM to eight of the new, WB multiswitch's ports.

[yogi]

You would need one 24v power supply for the 2 slot chassis, two 24v for the 4,and three 24v for the six slot chassis.