setup/equipment help plse

[oldfart]

Hi
Currently we (2 of us in the same house) have 3 dreamboxes and 5 dishes. The boxes are fed via disecq switches. there are 2 motorised dishes and fixed dishes at 28.2, 19 and 13. there are octo lnbs on the fixed dishes. Dual lnbs on the motors.
We are getting a larger 28.2 dish (2.4m) which can only have a quad lnb (so we have been told)

So do we need a multiswitch? if so - how many (any recommendations on type?)
Take into account - 2 of the boxes *could* record 2 different channels each at the same time and the 3rd box could be on a different transponder on the same dish.
Note - location - Canaries
ta in advance

 

[OldBen]

Having just done "the knowledge" to work out multiswitches myself, let me see if I can give something back and help out. Will leave the dish size question to someone else, along with the LNB type being forced to a Quad, I thought the large dishes had C120 LNB's and they came in most flavours of LNB (not sure about Octo. What model is it?

If you have a quad, you can have 4 feeds to 4 single tuner receivers, if the dreamboxes are dual tuner you can feed 2 dual tuner boxes. So the question is do you want 6 28.2 feeds for 3 dual tuner dreamboxes? If yes you need a multiswitch, if no you can run separate feeds from the quad as you do with the octo today. As you have an octo today and based on your text above it sounds like you have 2 dual tuners and a single, so need 5 outputs from the 28.2 dish?

If you fit a quattro to the new dish, you can put in a, multiswitch (e.g 5 in 8 out) and have 8 outputs that can be individually switched so up to 8 tuners, so if you need 5 or more outputs you are fine. The Quattro has 4 outputs, but these are fixed to high vertical, high horizontal, low vertical, low horizontal. The multiswitch effectively just connects the voltage/polarity the receiver selects for the transponder it wants to the right connection, so you can gave 8/12/16/24/32+ outputs from one dish.

If the dish really does only support a quad, there are a limited number of switches that support the 22Khz tone required in the switch to select LNB polarity. So it asks each of the 4 quad LNB's to be high vertical, high horizontal, low vertical, low horizontal as they would be in a quattro. Antiference and EMP Centauri are the two I am aware of that can work this way.

Hope that helps. Paul.

 

[oldfart]

Cheers for the reply, sorry I forgot - the boxes have dual tuners (soon to be quad!) so yes you are correct - need at least 5 feeds from a quad lnb.
Also - can the multiswitch deal with the other dishes? would need lots of inputs methinks!

 

[OldBen]

Forgot to turn on notification... you can get 5/9/13/17 input multiswitches for 1/2/3/4 quattro LNB's so you could do the fixed dishes this way. Don't think you can share the motorised dishes, you would have to leave them as you have now on certain receivers - you can't be steering the dishes from more than one receiver anyway?