[moisheh]

I have a new SWM Slimline 5 dish on the roof. HR 24 Receiver in the living room. The house is a post and beam with an open floor plan so no real inside walls near the TV to run cables. We just bought a Samsung 60 inch and moved the 46 inch to the basement. My new Slimline came with a MSPLIT8R1 that I am not using. The house was wired with some type of RG cable by the previous owner/builder. I haven't taken off a wall plate to see what type of cable he used. There are outlets in every room and I would imagine a lot of splits or splitters. The basement TV is strictly to be used when on the treadmill. Could care less if I have to watch the same channel as the upstairs unit. How am I going to wire that basement TV? I do have an extra SD RCVR. A D12. If I have to run new wiring to the basement( Cat5 or HDMI) it will be difficult but it is doable. That way I would just split the HDMI cable and run a wire. Or go the Cat5 to HDMI routine. Can I use the MSPLIT and somehow utilize the existing house cables and the D12 RCVR? I would put up another dish and run a cable to the basement but the home has a metal roof and the dish is installed on the log siding on the chimney. Due to lots of trees no place to put another dish.

Thanks

 

[carl6]

You may be able to use the D12 (although you will have SD on a 46" screen which you will probably not care for). Find the other end of the coax that goes to your basement location. You need to identify what coax goes where with your current DirecTV installation, then find a place to put the splitter, then take a second output from the splitter and send it to the basement.

If you find a way to do all of that and make it work, you could use the same wiring to add an HD receiver in the basement to make better use of that 46" display. Either (D12 or H2x) will be the same recurring monthly cost.

You are correct, you may need to track down and eliminate some other splitters along the way. Worst case, they are buried in the walls someplace with no access. Best case, they are behind wall plates, or in crawl space or unfinished part of basement where you can find them.

Easiest way to chase the existing coax is to use a tone generator and tone tracking wand (search "tone tracer" on ebay).

Also, assuming you can trace the coax and find the other end near your HD installation, you could use an external rf modulator and feed an SD signal from there to the basement so you would have no receiver in the basement. Just plug the coax into the antenna input on the 46" tv and tune to the applicable channel. If you decide to do this, you need to search these forums about problems using the SD output of an HD receiver with the HD user interface.