[Road Rage]

I have a 2 level all brick home on a slab, and this really only relates to those in the same situation. When the house was built it was wired for cable in 3 rooms. This consists of a single cable from exterior to the attic where it hits a 3 way splitter to all three rooms. All cable is RG6 quad shield. When I moved in I brought my Phase 1 D* system with dish and all, I connected the dish to the external cable and then went up to the attic and removed the splitter for a direct line to the living room for my Sony SAT-T60, later I discovered diplexing so I installed an antenna in the attic and ran that down to the SAT-T60 and the master bedroom. Worked fine.

Later I decided I wanted D* in the master bedroom and my LNB was dual output. But the problem was no more cables going into the house. The thought of drilling through my brick just brought up all kinds of trashy, tackey mental images for me and the wife. But I finally rented a trencher and trenched all the way from the dish around the house to the back and then drilled through an exterior wall to the master bedroom then I ran a cable and buried it. So now I have 2 RG6 drops (1 OTA, 1 SAT) in the master bed and a single (OTA/SAT diplexed) in the living room.

Now that I have an H20 with the AU9 slimline dish and plans to replace the old SAT-T60 with an HR20 later it seems that somehow I have to find a way to get 4 friggin cables from the dish to a central location inside the house (attic I assume), which leads me to ask: Are folks REALLY drilling a huge a$$ hole in the side of their homes to run 4 cables through? Due to all the cable fishing and drywall repair this would require I could build a new home for less money. So I'm asking, If I stick to my current cable setup what will I never be able to do with current technology?

I'm aware of the possible diplexing OTA issues with MPEG-4 and that I may have to give that up but what else?

 

[bobnielsen]

If you can wait until the Frequency Translation Module is available (supposedly next year), you should be able to do what you want without running additional cables. In the meantime, you could take the two cables going to your current dish and connect them to two of the four outputs of the slimline. If you go to an HR20, you would be limited to using one tuner, but other than that it would work. You might be able to diplex in the OTA by putting the B-Band Converter module before the diplexer, as discussed in another thread on this forum.

 

[Road Rage]

If you can wait until the Frequency Translation Module is available (supposedly next year), you should be able to do what you want without running additional cables. In the meantime, you could take the two cables going to your current dish and connect them to two of the four outputs of the slimline. If you go to an HR20, you would be limited to using one tuner, but other than that it would work. You might be able to diplex in the OTA by putting the B-Band Converter module before the diplexer, as discussed in another thread on this forum.

My slimline is up already and that's what I'm doing now, just 2 connections. If loosing the second tuner on the HR20 is all I have to give up that's not a problem, my SAT-T60 has 2 tuners and I've never had the second one hooked up.

I found that thread you mentioned about possibly being able to diplex OTA with MPEG-4, very interesting and very good to know. I guess I'll just have to wait and see for now.