Distribute Freesat (when it arrives) around house

[Toonaroond]

Hi,

I'm waiting for Freesat to arrive and plan to use my existing dish with a quad LNB to send a signal to a HDD STB (which will cost around 120-150 quid :lease:).

What then would be the best way to send this signal to other rooms in the house?
I'd be looking to feed a signal to 3 rooms and have remote control and independent channel selection in each room (i.e. not just watch whats on the main TV everywhere)

I'm asking now as we are plastering some rooms at the minute and I want to put the wires and connector plates into the wall at this stage...

Cheers

[thegeby]

Unlike terrestrial TV only a quarter of the signals come down the wire from the dish at any given time.Which quarter (Vert-high/Horiz-high/Vert-low/Horiz-low) is decided by the receiver. So:

1) Every room will need a receiver. Unless you want the full EPG everywhere there are cheap DVB-S boxes or why not a basic Sky box going cheap on eBay.

2) Pull each coax from the LNB to the desired room, 2 coax to your PVR location. If you are anyway connectiing serveral rooms, I suggest you pull a Cat-5e or Cat-6 cable at the same time for future networking capability. It is handy to be able to attach a PC (and even better to hide the ugly b****r in another room).

3) plaster and fit 2 single wall plates and one double.

[Stephen Neal]

If you need more than 4 LNB feeds - then you could consider a multiswitch which will take the 4 inputs from a Quad, or Quattro, LNB and then let you feed each receiver / PVR tuner with a separate feed from the multiswitch.

[Toonaroond]

Cheers for the reply.

I've already got Cat5e plans in motion but that was to do with streaming audio and video from my PC - is there some benefit of doing this from a Satellite distribution point of view too?

I've been putting some more thought into this and there are a couple of issues that I'd like to address.

Firstly, where the dish is would mean some really convoluted runs of cable to get them into the rooms they need to be in directly from the LNB (the house is two houses knocked into one and built into the side of a hill so is across 6 floors and higgeldy piggeldy to say the least!). This would also mean less flexibility at a later date in terms of extra TVs in different rooms to what I want now.

I'd rather not have to have a receiver in each location - cutting back on boxes is my new New(ish) Year Resolution!! In the main room I'd be happy with my DVD player/streamer, Amp and the PVR satellite receiver but in the other rooms I'd rather not have any boxes at all (Kitchen, Bedrooms etc)

I was hoping that there was someway of having a central distributions system in the room where the PC would be and then sending the signal from there as required (along with the Cat5e from my router incidentally!). I've heard of loft boxes but am not aware of the possibility of putting one feed in and getting multiple (up to 5?) connections to different rooms without having boxes - is this possible at all on a budget?

[Toonaroond]

If you need more than 4 LNB feeds - then you could consider a multiswitch which will take the 4 inputs from a Quad, or Quattro, LNB and then let you feed each receiver / PVR tuner with a separate feed from the multiswitch.

Cheers for reply.

I'm not sure if I get how this works - does that mean it will send the feed automatically to whichever receiver is turned on, up to a maximum of 4 units at a time or does it feed to more units than that at a time? (not that we will want 4 TVs or more on at once!).

This may well do the trick for me, I'm guessing that I could have one of these in a central place and send the feed from there to the rooms that I want...can anyone recommend a decent place to get these from (and a good manufacturer perhaps?)

Cheers

[thegeby]

Cheers for reply.

I'm not sure if I get how this works - does that mean it will send the feed automatically to whichever receiver is turned on, up to a maximum of 4 units at a time or does it feed to more units than that at a time? (not that we will want 4 TVs or more on at once!).

This may well do the trick for me, I'm guessing that I could have one of these in a central place and send the feed from there to the rooms that I want...can anyone recommend a decent place to get these from (and a good manufacturer perhaps?)

Cheers

If you only use one dish and have 4 points to feed in the house, the multiswitch reallly does not add anything except that it can mix terrestrial and satellite signals in one cable. You would still need 4 coax from the LNB to the multiswitch and a coax to every room. The multiswitch kicks in if you need 2 or more dishes or want to feed more than 4 rooms. They are not that cheap, anyway. You are probably better off with an Octo LNB.

On the other point of the Cat-5e, the beauty of a LAN is that any node is a distribution point and and a feed at the same time. so your PC would have one address, your receiver(s) another, etc. You will already find DVB-S boxes (such as the dreambox) with networking capabilities and your PC already has it.

We are of course all waiting for the holy grail in the form of a DVB-S/S2 HD receiver with PVR, networking capability, USB and a HDMI port.

[Toonaroond]

We are of course all waiting for the holy grail in the form of a DVB-S/S2 HD receiver with PVR, networking capability, USB and a HDMI port.

....for under 100 quid :grin:

[thegeby]

....for under 100 quid :grin:

You profligate wastrel:nono: