Supervolcano said:
Sorry to hear your troubles. I was in the first beta test group for the SWM8 over a year ago and it still works quite nicely.
How would the SWMline dish help in this case?
It's still needs external power inserter (I think).
And it would still be subject to malfunctions like the SWM8.
You are misstating my position. I said if it were me, I'd go with a SWMline dish instead of a regular dish (which contains a multiswitch), a bank of 4 splitters and two SWM8s (with two power inserters).
There is a significant difference in amount of stuff to break in a system with just one SWMline pickup and a power inserter versus all the stuff listed above.
With the SWMline dish, your forever max'ed out with 8 tuners.
Yes. But forever isn't forever. It'd cost you an additional $90 (tops) to get an AU9 and out of your jam. It's a calculated risk at that point, right? If you see a 100% chance that you'll need to upgrade to even more tuners later, then putting it off doesn't make sense. But if you think it's likely you'll never need to go further (perhaps 6 receivers in your house constitutes nearly every room that doesn't have a toilet in it), taking the risk you won't need more tuners soon versus the penalty of $90 to start over isn't a huge deal.
With the SWM8 and slimline dish, you can add a second multiswitch if you need more than 8 tuners.
You don't need a multiswitch to add more SWMs. Just splitters and another SWM.
Oh, maybe you were referring to a SWM as a multiswitch, if so, that's rather confusing, a multiswitch usually means a Zinwell or such.
You'd rather not use the 2 legacy ports today for fear of upgrading those receivers maybe several months or even longer from now? I, and probably most people would be the opposite on this one. Use it for it's full capability today, and if you outgrow it down the road, swap around some wires back by the multiswitch when that day comes.
Depends on how you wire your house. I was assuming that he didn't have home runs for each leg, so it would be some effort to reconfigure later. Now typing it, it looks like a pretty big assumption.
And if he got a SWMline dish, can it even operate the 2 legacy receivers? I thought that to use the SWMline dish, ALL the receivers had to be SWM Capable?
What legacy receivers? You made them up. He said he has three HR20-700s, will add another (which likely won't be an HR20 at all, but will be an HD DVR), and then he'll add two more receivers. It would be difficult for any of the three new receivers to not be SWM compatible, as that's all D* sells now.
Doesn't need splitters?
How would he hook the SWM port to 4 different receivers?
Need AT LEAST 1 four-way or 2 two-way splitters (thank you VOS for correcting me).
Yeah, I was talking about splitters above the SWM8s. You get to eliminate those, if you have two SWM8s, you need 4 2-way splitters above them.
You're absolutely correct you'll need splitters below the SWMs, as a SWM8 only has two outputs and you need 4 (well, if you have two SWM8s you could go 3 and 5 instead of 4 and 4 but we'll ignore that). However, you'll fine that 2 two-way splitters won't do the job. A 4 way splitter creates 3 additional ends, giving you 4 ends. Each two-way splitter only creates 1 new end, giving you 3 ends. If you want to attach 4 devices to one line using two-way splitters, you'll need at least 3 of them.
Now people are talking about diplexing below. I have my system diplexed. My sigline says otherwise right now, but that's because I had changed it up hoping diplexing was the problem and I didn't have to replace my SWM8. If you diplex, I'd recommend the good ones (IRD4001 and IRD4002) from Channel Master, I had problems with cheaper diplexers. You can get them at solidsignal. Note that using the OTA input on an SWM8 can be inconvenient, if you put the SWM8 near the dish, especially if you have an antenna amplifier, as the power inserter for that must go in above the diplexer (i.e. SWM8). In think the insertion loss complaints about the OTA input on the SWM8 are probably exaggerated, it will of course have 3dB more loss than a regular diplexer inserter given that it also has a two-way splitter in it. You cannot avoid a six-fold (average across all ends) insertion loss when splitting your OTA signal to 6 receivers, no matter how you do the diplexing.
