Big house. Combining SKY and Astra1 and HB FTV.

[barneylatham]

I hope someone has a bright idea to a problem that I would like to make a little simpler.
I am trying to improve a system in a large house to enable more flexibility.

The current setup is 2 Dishes, one with double LNB receiving Astra 1 & 2 and Hotbird. All signals sent to technical room and into large switch. with 30 outputs. When the house was built each room was wired with an output to allow satelitte TV in any room.

The owner did not want ugly sky boxes in the bedrooms so we have the 7 boxes in the technical room, with the control via sky eye. The origional cable from the multi switch was moved to the RF out ( no 2 with the power) on the sky box and an addtional cable fed from the multiswitch to the dish input. This setup works well for SKY.

The owner occasionally has guests in the house who want to watch European/Arab/Russian TV which we get from Astra1 or HotBird. This is fine in a room without sky as I just set up a new system with a cheap satellite receiver. The problem is that it is usally in a room that has SKY. This requires removing the cable from the RF out and changing to end fitting then moving is back to the multiswitch. In the room with the TV I remove the sky eye, change the end on the coax cable and add the receiver.

This is fine for someone a little technical, but I am looking for a solution that makes it easier for people with less technical knowledge or time.

I have concidered 2 AB switches per sky box to reroute the signal, would this provide too much signal loss? It does not seem easy to run extra cables around the house or I could simply add an extra cable to rooms that have sky.

I hope this makes sense in just word, sometimes it is confusing even when looking at it.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Barney

 

[satelliteman]

Hi,

Why not add the euroboxes to the smatv RF chain. If so, consider some sort of RF filtering also.

 

[barneylatham]

Thanks for the quick reply. I have just added the Eurobox to the RF chain. Not good news. The Signal from the SKY eye does not pass throught the Eurobox. I can move that though. The most important is that the Eurobox does not seem to recieve any signal through the sky box. Is the Sky meant to pass these signals through ? The euro box has a clear LNB in and out.

 

[rolfw]

You need to use a combiner, something like the Global SPC4, then use the global TVLink Plus _http://www.tvlink.co.uk/tvlinkplus.htm

 

[barneylatham]

I am not sure I understand correctly. The combiner you mention and the TV links are all about controlling the SKY boxes. I have no problem with the sky boxes, I wish to include Eurostyle boxes in the system. I already have TV links on all sky boxes and each room has its own cable from the basement so I cannot see why I need the combiner. Maybe you meant that I need to combine 1 sky box and 1 eurobox with one tvlink for each room. Is there a eurobox that works with tv link and has rf output?

One added thought, are there any receivers that will show Astra, and HB channels and take a sky card for non-free channels channels

 

[rolfw]

OK, well if the other satellite box doesn't have an RF output, then you need to modulate it, triax do a unit which modulates two receivers , you then feed the output into the SPC4 and the othersatellite receivers will be controllable from any location where there is a Sky TVLink.