Dishpro upgrade cable?

[Bob Haller]

How critical is the RG6? I ordered dishpro stuff and am wondering if I can use the home depot RG6?

My cable lengths will be under 40 feet. Any experience with this?

[Richard King]

Shouldn't be a problem. RG-59 would probably work at that length.

[Bob Haller]

RG59 reportedly burns up / fries because of the higher voltage

[Richard King]

I have never heard that one.

[DishDude1]

RG-59 works BETTER with dishpro then it did with the legacy equipment! I used to refuse to install a system if I couldn't replace their RG-59, now I will use it and never had a problem. It only makes sense, they claim the voltage can drop lower with dishpro and that the runs can be longer, which is what the problem with RG-59 and legacy systems, it couldn't pass the full 18 volts to the LNB, causing the even transponders to fail.

[Bob Haller]

Ugh, what about the high freuqency sweep test?

[Mike123abc]

RG-59 still passes through the higher frequencies like RG-6 does. But, the signal degrades a *lot* faster on RG-59 at higher frequencies. So, your signal drops off fast as your cable gets longer. Over 1GHZ where sat signals travel it drops very fast.

[Bob Haller]

So I can safely use home depots $40 for 500 feet RG6? Thats good news Since my cable runs are going to be shorter anyway.

[Jacob S]

Dishpro should have 2.2+ GHZ sweep tested wire. RG-59 should not be used at all with any satellite setup. When people use switches with RG-59 I have seen the wires work for a while then quit working, and are a lot more sensative to kinks, etc in the wire. I think the additional voltage burns the wire up. When the wire has something happen to it or is run on RG-59 it cannot send all the information through or the voltage/voltage changes as it could with RG-6.

[Loose Cannon]

Where (or how) does quad shielding come into all this nonsense?

[Tomsoundman]

Quad shielding has to do with blocking interference from other RF sources.

IMHO, unless you are in an area that it would be needed, it is not necessary. It is a little harder to work with too - not as flexible.

[waydwolf]

Dishpro should have 2.2+ GHZ sweep tested wire. RG-59 should not be used at all with any satellite setup. When people use switches with RG-59 I have seen the wires work for a while then quit working, and are a lot more sensative to kinks, etc in the wire. I think the additional voltage burns the wire up. When the wire has something happen to it or is run on RG-59 it cannot send all the information through or the voltage/voltage changes as it could with RG-6.

Again with the sweep testing. A pox on every salesman who sticks his head in the lab door and every technician at the bench who doesn't keep their oscilloscope out of the sight of know-nothing marketeers.

Unless a cable is made with a wildly different metal, wildly different dielectric, wildly different shielding, and wildly different jacketing, most new pieces of cable and a lot of old ones will have characteristics so similar across the spectrum from 5Mhz to 2050Mhz as to be indistinguishable by the untrained person.

I've heard the same sales crud on fittings, ground blocks, and more. Unless the signal is being acted on as part of an electronic circuit, copper is copper. A 1ft length of RG-6 dual shield from Belden and a 1ft length of RG-6 dual shield from Perfect 10 will BOTH carry satellite just fine whether the box says satellite or cable on it.

Your limitations are on actual physical state of the cable such as age, damage if any, size(RG-6 or RG-59, and length.

I could sweep test a piece of copper water pipe to 3Ghz if I wanted, doesn't mean it could be used for DBS.

[Jacob S]

So even if the wire says 1.8 GHZ it could have only been tested up to that range but could in fact be tested beyond that?

[Lightnin1]

All you yo-yo's that think rg-59 is compatible with even legacy equipment are way out there.

If dish thought rg-59 would work with any of there equipment, they would specify it.

[Jacob S]

I would not use RG-59 for any receivers that have switches or dishpro connected to them, especially over long distances.

[waydwolf]

All you yo-yo's that think rg-59 is compatible with even legacy equipment are way out there.

If dish thought rg-59 would work with any of there equipment, they would specify it.

First rule of all DBS and cable installation is Occam's Razor, 20th century edition: K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Stupid

Therefore, we often find existing RG-59 runs, sometimes in apartment buildings where we can't do anything about it, and will often use it.

I've had over three hundred successful cable modem installations on RG-59. Better than fifty DBS installations worked like a charm on RG-59. Literally over a thousand digital cable installations with RG-59 in the mix.

The first matter is cable size(yes, size does matter) because RG-59 carries a lot less far than RG-6 does on a power for power, frequency for frequency basis. Nevertheless, smaller cable than this can and often is used as jumper cable inside specialty equipment boxes in DBS building wiring(see mini cablehttp://www.hollandelectronics.com/catalog/cable.html).

The second matter is that most RG-59 ceased being standard cabling by cable companies YEARS ago, such that any not in a controlled environment is likely to have been corrupted by normal weathering(long chain polymers in the jacket and dielectric break due to background and UV radiation and pollution, they oxidize, microcracks form, atmospheric water vapor infiltrates, etc.). Corrupt cable whether RG-59 OR RG-6 is bad. I've seen bad 1/2 and 3/4 hardline go bad.

[Mike123abc]

It is easier to spec something you know will work (RG-6) rather than spec something that might work most the time RG-59. Removing the cable from the mix of things that can go wrong really simplifies things.

[Jacob S]

I have used RG-59 in some cases where the house was already wired up and there was no other option (customer wanted to use existing wire and did not want to run new wire in) in which results sometimes in the customer not being able to get the dish500 because the switches will burn out the wire as I have seen before. The customer only orders top50 anyways so this does not affect the customer. It had been several years back when dish500's were just coming out.

[Nick]

Why would anyone already doing new cable runs even consider RG-59? A poor choice just to save a few bucks.

[Jacob S]

Probably because the contractor does not know about different wire sizes when running the wire as they wired it up for cable television instead of satellite and got the cheap wire to save money.

[Nick]

Jacob, the question is rhetorical, therefor requires no answer.

Anyway, Bob said he was ordering his own cable.

[Bob Haller]

I used home depots RG6 and dishpro is working well.

[sampatterson]

I also used the home depot RG6 for 100ft runs (have 3 to the bedroom, and 4 to the living room) with no issues.

[Mike500]

Most any RG6 cable will work fine for short to medium length runs. Since the shield wires are made of aluminum and the shields are made of mylar coated foil, conductivity only becomes an issue for long runs carry lnb switching and multiswitch switching signals. Home Depot cable has 40% shield and so do a lot of inexpensive 2.2Ghz swept cables. The best cables have 60-90% shielding and may be standard, tri or quad shielded. Only for long runs and when there will be a large proliferation of stray signals generated in the 1000-1300Mhz range will shielding be beneficial. Spectrum sharing will eventually become a reality as the air waves become more crowded.

[Bob Haller]

Well is there LIMP RG6?

The home depot cable is kinda stiff making it hard to manipulate receivers being swapped out for HD failures:(

I am conserative RG6 only, no diplexors and KISS. Makes troubleshooting easy.

[Mike500]

The cable is very stiff, because it has a copper coated steel center conductor called "CopperWeld." Copperweld is preferred by many cable companies, because it is very durable. It is less prone to kinking and stretching from being pulled. They no longer make hard drawn copper for aerial drops. For transmitting the signal, it has about the same capacity as solid copper. For dbs, it is only a problem as it is more likely to experience a voltage drop in the switching voltage for long runs.

[Jacob S]

Whats the difference between the Eagle Aspen 60% braided 2.25 GHZ High Performance wire and the Dish Network 2.2 GHZ wire? Both are RG-6

[Mike500]

Probably not much, as far as function is concerned.