[vkm1975]

Hello All -

I'm purchasing a condo in the coming months, and have a decent view of the southern sky here in Chicago, and don't foresee any HOA issues installing DTV.

The DTV dish will be mounted on my deck, but I am not sure if DTV will be allowed to drill through the brick to connect the dish to the receiver. The next best option might be using a flat cable through the sliding glass door. My questions:

1. Is the DTV installation team allowed to use flat panel cables for a standard installation, with the latest DTV equipment?

2. Do flat cables hinder the signal quality or clarity of HD?

Thanks!

 

[AntAltMike]

I'd be surprised if DirecTV allows them to be part of an "approved" installation because they have a reputation for a high mechanical breakage incidence, but you can have the DirecTV installer run a round coax through your window and tell him you'll be taping over the air gap... and then replace it with a flat one after he leaves. There are a lot of practices that authorized vendors do not approve because they tend to complicate and thereby increase the cost of servicing the customer in the future. For example, so-called "diplexers" work just fine, but it is a nuisance to satellite TV companies to get called out to service systems where the cable guy took them out and blamed them for some problem to the cable system that they did not cause.

In fact, I have used flat "twin lead" that I pigtail-spliced to the cut coax to develop the thinnest possible window crack conductor and never had trouble with that. Over a decade ago, ChannelPlus made a product that I think was called GlassLink that consisted of a pair of transducers that could pass an L-band satellite signal through glass and even pass enough current to power the LNB's amp and polarity switching, but they never developed multiband or multisatellite products to meet contemporary needs.

 

[slice1900]

Never heard of GlassLink, but there's one for sale on eBay. The flat coax cable is cheaper but if someone had a situation where they had a window that wasn't operable, it would still be possible to pass signal through it. Pretty cool!

 

[peds48]

Some markets stopped using them because of the failure rate. However if you have an AC unit facing the deck you can put the cable through there

 

[west99999]

All O&O markets use flat cables anytime they are needed. Im not sure about Chicago being O&O though so if its HSP then install may vary.

 

[carl6]

Another option is to put a small wood piece (or even thick foam/weather stripping) in the window gap where the coax comes through, and wedge a stick or bar in the other side to "lock" it closed. If the particular window does not need to be opened regularly, this is usually an acceptable workaround.

 

[harsh]

Over a decade ago, ChannelPlus made a product that I think was called GlassLink that consisted of a pair of transducers that could pass an L-band satellite signal through glass and even pass enough current to power the LNB's amp and polarity switching, but they never developed multiband or multisatellite products to meet contemporary needs.

Given the complete dependence on power coming from the interior, these signal induction setups aren't really practical for DBS.

Sliding doors (and most windows) are just too tightly weatherstripped any more.

 

[AntAltMike]

Given the complete dependence on power coming from the interior, these signal induction setups aren't really practical for DBS....

Sure they are. The LNB powering must have been developed by forming a transformer consisting of coils on both sides of the window pane, and then making it DC, which is now efficiently done with switching regulator architecture.

The polarity switching and selected satellite switching would surely be done with DiSEqC protocol rather than the 13V/18V, 22MHz switching that was prevalent in that era.

There were at least two models of GlassLink for two different thickness of window, making me suspect that the reliability was not all that robust. I never had a call-back on either of the two that I sold and installed, but then, if they were unreliable, a customer might have just switched to cable TV and never notified me. If a customer had called me with a complaint, I would have had no way of diagnosing intermittent failure if it was not occurring during my service call, so I had already decided that if an intermittent problem was reported, I was just going to swap the unit, as I was carrying a spare