Home Refurb - AV/Network Set up

[RichA]

I am due to refurb my house in the coming months and I am starting to think of a simple (relatively cheap) set up. My basic requirements are tv/internet available for most rooms. Assume tvs will have freeview, will be supplemented by sky in snug (would also like a sky feed in lounge).

Thoughts, so far:

GF Cupboard - Router/AP, Ethernet Switch (x16), Aerial distribution (?)

GF Office - Ethernet x4
GF Snug - Skybox, Sky Feed x2 + Coax x2 + Ethernet
GF Lounge - Coax + Ethernet

1F Beds (x3) - Coax + Ethernet
1F Landing - AP

Loft Bed - Coax + Ethernet

What advantage would a 'loftbox' provide?

Grateful for any guidance.

 

[ericmark]

I tried and failed to set up mothers home with TV and internet. Internet is now all WiFi and it works fine, I did run cables clearly something wrong, my son has a tester and said he would sort it for me, 3 months latter still waiting. I am sure cable links are better, but WiFi works.

As to TV I went to Electrofix and bought to reels of coax one twin for satellite, and one single for analogue TV from satellite boxes and freeview. From these pages it seems the stuff from Electrofix was expensive rubbish, Lucid recommended a cable which when I used that was much better.

However there is a problem mixing analogue and freeview, I can swap the channel numbers as much as I want, but either the freeview stops analogue or analogue stops freeview. There is only one option it would seem, separate cables and a switch or simply unplug one cable and plug in the other.

In the old days of all analogue my own house was wired, from aerial to living room, to Sky box back to loft into a booster/splitter with through system for Sky Digieye with cables then to bed rooms, kitchen and dining room so we could watch sky or analogue channels and change sky channel from every room. It worked great until freeview.

At home I have two satellite dishes and freeview has been kicked to touch. At mother house we still have freeview, at the moment, but it is a pain, forever changing channels and set top box auto puts freeview first so every time freeview changes so do all satellite channel numbers as well, so likely freeview will be kicked to touch at mothers house soon too.

My son with his house decided he would control the heating with the server in loft, so fitted a LAN cable to each radiator point as well as computer and TV points, only to find you can't buy hard wired eTRV's they are all WiFi so all these cables are redundant. He must have fitted miles of cable.

Similar here, laptop can be hard wired, but phones and tablets don't have that option. So having LAN points is really pointless. Did the same with telephones, there are telephone points in every room, just three are used. One to router, one to down stairs phones which will only ring if caller ID is enabled, and one to up stairs phone which is kept to answer ambulance or hospital who it seems don't want anyone to know who they are.

TV size does make a difference, on a 14" TV in my bedroom analogue links are great, in wife's room with 32" you can see the picture is not that good, this house 1 x 43" + 3 x 32" + 1 x 14" + 1 x 9" with analogue links 32" is acceptable, with the 43" it really does need a HD signal.

 

[winston1]

However there is a problem mixing analogue and freeview, I can swap the channel numbers as much as I want, but either the freeview stops analogue or analogue stops freeview. There is only one option it would seem, separate cables and a switch or simply unplug one cable and plug in the other.

Should be no problem at all. After all the broadcasters mixed them for years. I have 4 analogue UHF channels mixed with Freeview and an HDMI modulator all fed to eight points around the house and it works well. Just get the levels and frequencies right and it should work.

A loft box is just a distribution and mixing centre, something you can makeup yourself with discreet components.

 

[ericmark]

Should be no problem at all. After all the broadcasters mixed them for years. I have 4 analogue UHF channels mixed with Freeview and an HDMI modulator all fed to eight points around the house and it works well. Just get the levels and frequencies right and it should work.

A loft box is just a distribution and mixing centre, something you can makeup yourself with discreet components.

Using good quality transmitters you are correct, should be able to mix analogue and digital on the same cable, we have repeaters where the in and out are only 600 apart which I have used a lot.

However most of the RF outputs come from set top boxes, and it would seem these are poor quality, not only that clearly the TV's are not the best, in theory the analogue signal should not be degraded by the digital signal as the digital received on the aerial should be clean, but it is effected so the TV must have a poor rejection.

Theory as you say it should work, in practice however from bitter experience it does not, it could even be the cable is not quite the right length just 9" can make a huge difference, using a VSWR meter I have trimmed aerial leads in the past to improve signal, however the VSWR meter will not really measure the mW used, I was licensed for 400W although normally no more than 45W used, but the meters will not work with TV transmitters.

So although you can, often it is not worth the effort, having feeds from the LNB into each room, and using the RF from the Sky box as it may be viewing a encrypted channel is likely good enough. Even then it is likely you can watch Sky on the PC anyway.

I have redundant cables everywhere in my house where I have done things like have double telephone cables, one local fed from fax machine so once fax cuts in all telephones are isolated so the fax has a higher baud rate, at the time we had two numbers with different rings one would auto start fax machine. Non of this is now used. The last fax I sent or received must be 5 years ago, one relative still had a machine, when she died we stopped sending or receiving fax. It was after all a 19th century invention.

But in general we don't need the cables we did years ago, and modern units don't even have the option, can't plug my phone into the LAN it's wireless or nothing.

 

[Lucid]

Technology changes, and with it the infrastructure needed to support it. At the same time there's also the requirement in many cases to maintain backwards compatibility for legacy devices.

The most future-proofed systems (in this case read 'systems' as houses) aren't those with lots of wire; instead, they're the houses where the wiring can be changed easily. Cable is relatively cheap. Chopping out walls and lifting floors is where most of the cost is. Put trunking in place that allows new cable to be pulled easily and you dramatically cut the cost of managing change in the future.