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Hi,

We decided to change a room in our basement into a HT, we ripped it down to the studs are are building it back up with sound treatment, etc. One of the things we did when the ceiling was exposed was to cable most of the house for multiple uses - we put 2 drops into each room upstairs (1 story hosue) and also in the basement. Each drop consists of 2 CAT5 cables and 1 COAX. We wanted the ability to move TV viewing around depending on changing needs, either ours our the next owner's. All cables right now are originating in the basement, we hope to add a distribution panel of sorts to be able move things around as needed.

I am not familiar with Satellite connections, we originally set this up for cable. However when everything is ready, we are going to switch, right now we are leaning towards E*, although D* might come into play (by the way, I'm going to post something similar in the D* forum as they may have different cabling needs). After deciding on satellite, I thought that for OTA purposes, I need to run another COAX to the primary rooms. One important point: we're probably 2 months out from being ready to install a sat. system.

In a couple of weeks we are are going to drywall - now is the time to make any changes. So here's what our setup is: our HD viewing will be done in the HT (HDTV & DVDs) on a projector (Panasonic AE700). This is a small house w/ no children, so we will have another SD TV in one of the rooms upstairs, right now a bedroom. We'll never do more, although the next owner might. While this current set is SD, more than likely we'll change over to HD when that set is retired.

I got some good ideas from a forum member on E* boxes, he told me that one approach would be to a dual tuner E* receiver. This would reside in the basement and drive the HD projector. In this approach, the sat. COAX would come here, as well as the OTA COAX. Then I would push the SD signal from this box directly to the SD TV upstairs (as well as the OTA) - w/ a run of two COAX cables. While this would work, it would mean that I'd have to run this receiver to SDTV COAX to everywhere I'd like to have the SDTV. I'm hoping that rather than this approach, I could run this 2nd COAX run back to the distribution panel so we could change the location of the 2nd SDTV easily.

So my questions (after being so long-winded): does this sound like a good approach? Is the 2nd SD tuner work well or should we go to a separate receiver at that SDTV? I understand that the 2nd SDTV is controlled by a UHF remote, is this technology around for the long haul? And finally, any feedback on our wiring?

Thanks!
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