Advice on Sky / TV cabling to keep all options open

[drmrbrewer]

Situation:

(a) satellite dish already up on side wall of house, feeding one room in house with Sky+
(b) new detached annex being built with a metre or two of that side wall of house. Annex is a small two-up two-down.
(c) would like to keep option open of having different Sky+ channels in the 4 rooms of annex, but for now probably only one or at most two different Sky+ channels will do.
(d) may look at adding another Sky+ room in house

My current thinking is:

(i) keep existing dish on house, with octo LNB. Install aerial next to it for standard signal.
(ii) feed five cables across to the annex, to a central point... four from the dish and one from the aerial.
(iii) from central point in annex, feed two cables to each room.
(iv) for now, at the central point just connect the 4 cables from the dish to two rooms (two per room), so only two rooms have Sky+ (direct feed from dish).
(v) at the central point, connect the cable from the aerial to all four rooms (over one of the two cables from central point to rooms), so all rooms have standard signal at least.
(vi) back at the dish, connect the other four outputs to two separate rooms in the main house.

This still gives the option of adding more rooms in the annex later without any additional cabling... by adding a multiswitch at the central point, using the four existing cables from the dish, feeding signals from the multiswitch to all four rooms using the existing internal cabling.

Not sure, but it may not be possible to run the multiswitch in the annex and still use the other four LNB output for the main house? If that is the case, worst case is that I put up another dish (and start to look like I'm an offshoot of GCHQ).

Does the above make sense? Or are there far better ways of doing this? Bottom line is I want maximum flexibility, and don't want to have to add any more cabling in the new annex in future through shortsightedness now. And I don't particularly want a dish up on the new annex.

Thanks.

 

[daxi]

The more coax you use the more signal you loose. Each 3 dB is a loss of half the signal & 6 to 9 dB is real easy to loose with signals at that frequency. So thats 75% to 87% of your signal gone.
Also each connector in line is capable of loosing at least 0.2dB to 0.5 dB per connector & thats if you use good quality ones. So a a connector on each piece of coax, plus a double female to join them & there goes up to 25% of your signal on that run.
A junction box will loose considerably more than 0.5 dB , so a connector in, a connector out, plus the box & you will not want a second one in line.
The more Coax you use the more important it is to use very high quality Coax & as that means more Copper per meter.
Do your home work & buy the best quality coax & connectors possible & check insertion losses on the boxes used.

 

[drmrbrewer]

Thanks for the comments, Daxi. Noted re signal loss. To avoid too many connections, I'm thinking that the four cables from the dish could initially be a continuous run all the way from the dish to the two annex rooms (via the central annex point, for future possibility of breaking them there for a multiswitch to branch off to fee the other two rooms).

Aside from that, and assuming the runs aren't that long and connections kept to a minimum, does the overall strategy sound OK to give me everything I need for now and future in the annex without rewiring?

Thanks.

 

[1028741]

it is the best idea to run all cables to central point, that's what I did. You can also install a "loft box" so that you take the RF out from the sky box and feed it to tv's that are only used occasionally. You can watch the sky box from another room, and control it using a "magic eye" that plugs inline with the coax into the back of the tv, this might be a good option for you instead of getting so many sky boxes

 

[Sam Gangee]

I'm not good at painting a picture from a description so, if you want my input, you'll have to provide a wiring diagram. You should draw one in any case for your own reference.

Meanwhile see http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/multiswitches.htm
and http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/lofthelp.htm

Chances are, one or other is what you need. But you must make up your mind which.

 

[ChrisFrost]

This is an 8 month old thread that 1028741 has resurrected. I'm pretty sure that whatever the original enquiry, it has long since been sorted out.