House prewired w/RG59

[Keller]

My house was prewired w/RG59. The length from the ground block outside to the wall plate is ~100 feet. From the LNB to the ground block is RG6 swept to 2.5. I have Dish and my signal on 119 TP 11 is 105 and on 110 TP 11 is 90. Will it add any value to rewire my house w/RG6?

[SimpleSimon]

Keller: Why not register and join us officially - it's free!

The answer to your question depends on a couple of things.

Most important is whether your system is DishPro or not. If it's DishPro, your even transponders are going to be affected by the inferior cable. So, what's your signal strength for transponder 12 on both birds?

In any event, 100' of RG-59 in your setup is really only asking for problems - but if it's working, I'd say leave it alone - just be aware that you might have to deal with it somewhere down the road.

[Keller]

S.S., First let me say thanks for the quick response and yes I will register...

Yes, it is a Dishpro and the values on 119TP12 is 98 and 110TP12 is 75.

I have had some intermittent signal loss and wondered if that length of RG59 has anything to do with it.

[SimpleSimon]

That 110TP12 is pretty low. You shouldn't have more than a couple of points of difference between 11 & 12 of a given bird.

However, I would've expected to see corresponding lower values on the 119TP12.

In any event, I think you're extremely lucky to be getting anything at all in the way of even TPs on a DishPro system using 100' of RG-59. It's must've been top of the line cable.

There's 2 ways out of this. Replace all the DishPro gear with Legacy. That's taking a step backwards. The other is to run a new RG-6 feed for the satellite. You can leave the RG-59 in the walls - it's fine for distributing TV signals around the house.

I still don't know your receiver setup, or thoughts for expansion, but it's almost always a good idea to run dual RG-6 instead of single.

Scenario: Right now you've got a single tuner box in one room. Next year you might want to add a 721 or 921 - without the second RG-6 you'd have to switch out to DP+ gear with a DP+ Separator.

[Keller]

Thanks SS...Again, when Dish came out and did the install they ran new RG6 from the dish to the house "interface".
Then from the interface to the wall plates in the house is all RG59. The majority of the 100'RG59 runs along the floor joists with the last ~3' in the wall.

I'll probably just try to fish that final 3 feet into the wall box to keep everything proper.

[SimpleSimon]

Cool - you shouldn't have too much trouble with the last 3' - it's probably not stapled.

Little trick - take your new cable and use a barrel connector to tie it to the old cable in the wall box, then start pulling from under the floor - out goes the old, in comes the new. :)

Finally, never use staples to hold the cable to the floor joists - spend the extra few pennies for plastic cable clips.

[SouthernSky]

Little trick - take your new cable and use a barrel connector to tie it to the old cable in the wall box, then start pulling from under the floor - out goes the old, in comes the new.

But make sure you wrap tape around the whole connection or you might find a connector getting pulled off inside the wall when it goes over a corner or something else that grabs on. :)