Thread: A 500' Dish-house distance?

Originally Posted by Stargazer

The only option is to run power out there then make a little enclosed building to put your satellite receiver in then run coax the rest of the way with a UHF remote solution.

Wonder how reliable the RF portion of the remotes are at 400 ft ?

I know that there are people who have 500 ft runs with DirecTV. If I were going to do this, I would try the following.
First, use an SWM dish not a regular one. It will support up to 8 tuners on a single cable back to the house. SWM has the advantage that it does not rely on the signalling voltage to select the correct satellite, and also uses frequencies lower than regular DirecTV so any signal attenuation due to long runs is reduced.
Second, use RG11 cable. Expensive but has less signal loss.
Third, you will need an SWM amplifier.
Sonora LA141R SWM8 Line Amp 14 dB gain 54 to 3500 MHz w/ Sub Band Return 2 to 40 MHz w/ External Power Port (LA141R) - Sonora - LA141R - LA141R - swm8 amp swm 8 amp swim8 amp swim 8 amp mfh2 LA141 LA141r LA141 r KA KU KA/KU LA-141r

Solid Signal says 250ft but this is very conservative. People have run the SWM without the amplifier at 200 ft or more, even with RG6. Using the amp with RG11 gives you a very good chance of getting to 400ft plus.
You should put the SWM power inserter for the dish in the workshop, then you won't have any problem with power drop to the SWM dish. All you will be concerned about is making sure the signal gets to and from the dish.

At this sort of distance there are no guarantees but the SWM config has IMHO the best chance of success.