I want to use the second output from a Dish 522 receiver in multiple rooms of my house.?

Question

I only want to use one TV at a time on the second 522 output. But I want to be able to move the TV from room to room as needed. I was thinking of using an 8 way splitter to run lines to the several rooms, only one of which would be used at any one time. Can I do this? And if so what kind of splitter do I need? I've see two at firefold.com. One is about $3 and says that it is 900MHz. The other is $36 and says that it is 2 Gig. But they don't tell you much about them otherwise. Thanks Marty

Answer 1

OK I can help you out.

What the 900Mhz splitter means is that 900 Mhz is upper limit of the bandwidth of the signal  anything above that will be lost.  In analog TV is comes to channel 141. It is an RF splitter (Radio Frequency) Very commonly used in the cable industry. Don't confuse the analog with the channel numbers of the Dish Receiver you will be using only channel 3. 61 Mhz.

A 2 Gig splitter will pass satellite frequencies and is probably power passing for moving the satellite receiver from one place to another.

If you are using the second output TV out of the receiver you only need the RF model.

You most  likely will need some sort of amplifier from the output of the receiver before the splitter.  An 8 way splitter has a signal loss of 11 dB per port.   (It doesn't matter if you use them or not just going through the splitter causes the loss)  

The dB is the measure of the strength of a TV signal .

The Satellite receiver puts out an output of about 5 dB plus loss in  the cable run so the picture might not be too good without an amp.

TV wants about 3 dB of signal for great reception.  Zero dB is OK anything less and the picture is grainy.

A 4 way splitters  loss is 7dB per port. so you might get away using a  4 way with NO amp.

Your idea will work fine but as you probably know you will only get the picture that is on the satellite receiver.