Need advice on what RG6 cable to run in my house

Boy do I identify with your question. When you are on the outside looking in, the technologies of DirecTV can be really confusing. And when I called their technical service for answers I ended up with additional confusion.

The answer is not as simple as it seems it should be, but I will give it a try. I am going to assume you are talking about at least two HD receivers which in turn typically triggers a SWM install. The basic SWM LNB supports 8 tuners which sounds like a lot, but goes away quickly when one of them is an HR34 which has 5 tuners. Each HD DVR (other than the HR34) has two tuners. This is important to know because the basic SWM only requires one coax going to the dish, while the more complex SWM-16 requires three lines (one for each 8 tuner signal and one for power). So you really need to take an honest appraisal of what you want in terms of receivers since the answer drives two completely different wiring requirements.

Next you have the issue of solid copper or copper clad. The satellite signals are happy with either avenue. But, on your basic SWM the coax carries the power from inside your house to the LNB. That power is only 21 volts and really wants solid copper to make sure the proper voltage gets to the SWM head. It takes a separate power line for the SWM-16. For the dish to inside the house part of your work, I would suggest designating a spot where the installer will do that run and let him do it. They have the right stuff for that. (On my installation they used solid copper coax with an integrated grounding line and attached the ground to my electrical meter box that was close by.)

Now you are down to distribution. This is where I did the wiring myself. While not preferred, I used copper-clad RG-6 which seems to be quite satisfactory. I designated a spot in the attic where I wanted the splitter to go and ran all the wires from there. I left those ends open and let the installer do the terminations. I did the terminations on the wall plate connections myself. Note that the installer will want to be sure that all barrel splices have the blue insert (which supposedly means they are tested for 3 GHz). They need to have that since if they have a QA guy show up to check the install they will get dinged if they are not there.

That leaves establishing a network connection. Just so you know, all MRV signals are intended to move over your coax network. (Yes you can put them on your router, but D* is designed to carry them over your coax.) And if you get any HR25s in your setup, there is no network cable connection on that box. D* expects to have any outside internet signal injected on their coax network. The easiest device for that today is the wireless CCK. You just insert this puppy in one of the coax lines and presto any DVR that wants internet is connected. So, while your cat/whatever lines could be used for connecting to your receivers, I would not recommend it.

Hope this helps.

DirecTV specification is for solid copper center conductor. Where that matters is between wherever your power source is, and the LNB on the dish. If that is a relatively short run, then copper clad steel will be no problem. But CCS has much greater resistance/voltage drop than does solid copper.

Typically you will wire from the dish to a central location, and from there out to your tv locations. I would suggest solid copper from the dish to the central location (and I would put in four coax for that). CCS from the central location to your tv location should be just fine. Because you will almost certainly be running SWM from your central location out to your TV locations, a single coax run should be sufficient. But, if your pulling wire anyway I would highly recommend a second coax be run at the same time.

As someone noted, compression connectors everyplace. Don't even think about crimps.

The reason for four coax from the dish location is so that you can support a regular (non-SWM) LNB should your tuner count ever exceed 8 (in which case you will have to use an external SWM16 multiswitch, which requires 4 coax from the dish).