I bought a high-definition tuner/DVR and satellite dish near a week ago. Due to the store I bought the thing at screwing up the installers never got the paperwork and wouldn’t budge till the store sorted it (which they did…eventually). So I call up for installation and they won’t do a damn thing till they get a letter from my landlord saying it is ok to install one. My landlord had already said this was ok and agreed to send the letter but he wasn’t overly quick to do it. So I call back and naturally every weekend install date is booked from now till 2050 with the earliest they will get to me is a week from Monday. As luck would have it I will be out of town for business for a week and then getting a day off to deal with the installers pushes that further back still. At this rate I will break the contract obligating me to start service within 30 days of service.
So, not willing to let a significant investment sit on the floor for a month (not to mention eagerness to get it working) I am wondering if anyone here knows the ins-and-outs of installing your own satellite dish?
Several points:
I have an HDTV and this is a triple-LNB dish (round, not oval). Does this make setup more difficult? I have seem some things suggesting oval dishes were much harder to deal with…do not know if this is true for round triple-LNB dishes.
My TV is on the north end of my apartment while the balcony the dish will be clamped to is at the opposite end (need that southern facing). The apartment it wired for cable (inactive in my unit currently). Can I splice into the main cable into the unit and put a T-splitter on it leaving the cable from outside disconnected? More to the point how hard is it to cut TV cable and put a new connector on? Special equipment needed? I am not up for running several hundred feet of cable all over the apartment.
On the cable note is the regular coax TV cable sufficient to carry an HDTV signal or do I need something else?
Where can I go to buy the special clamps needed to attach a satellite dish to the wood railing on my balcony? DirectTV installer said that is how they’d do it and I prefer that to bolting into the apartment masonry (doubt the landlord would be thrilled with that).
FWIW I am fairly technically inclined for home sort of things. With the right tools and fairly good instructions I am confident I can mange most things. That said I bow to the collected Doper wisdom and if consensus is “no way…wait for the installer” then so be it.
Another question…hopefully I’ll explain this correctly.
I live in a three flat apartment, new construction (less than 3 years old). I am assuming the cable from the local cable company comes into the apartment on one run and then splits out to the various jacks throughout the apartment (anyone correct me on any assumptions). Makes sense so the cable company can turn us off or on from the pole outside. Currently the cable signal to my apartment is off.
What I am wondering (and hoping) is that a signal can run both ways through the cable in the apartment. My thought is to run the cable from the dish outside to the cable jack in the room that leads to the balcony. Just screw in the dish to that outlet and it will be “seen” by the tuner way across the apartment on a different jack. Sounds good in theory to me as they all the jacks in the apartment must be daisy chained together. I just do not know if there is some “device” somewhere in cable wiring that only permits a signal to go one way.
Will that work?
Also, the dish says it needs RG-6 cable to work properly. Is this your standard coax cable or is it different than what you generally find in home cable wiring?
That should work. You could check it out fairly easily by connecting a VCR coax output to the cable connection near the balcony, and see if your TV can pick up the signal as you play a tape. If it does, then the satellite signal should reach the TV too.
With the building being so new, the cable is probably RG-6. You could open up one of the cable connections and see if the cable is marked. I have a friend who uses the older coax for his DirecTV and he says it works fine, but he does not have the high definition system.
Dunno for sure. If by more difficult you mean more difficult to aim, I would guess yes it’s more difficult since I believe you will need to be aiming it at more than one satellite. I’m just guessing here.
The satellite signal does not play well with splitters or anything else inline. You really want just a direct line of cable from the dish to the tuner. Also, each tuner needs its own coax line.
The cable itself is probably okay but if it’s daisy chained, there will be a splitter involved and that could make it not work. They probably used RG6 since it doesn’t cost that much more than the other stuff.
Dunno.
Of course if you’ve got all the bits and pieces, you could just connect the cables to the outlets you’ve got and see what happens. For that matter, I’d move the tv to the balcony room and just run a cable from the dish to the tuner to get it working until the installer comes.