Consolidate dishes in Condo complex

[Maxim]

Hi,

I'm pretty new to this but couldn't find a similar topic so I'll give it a go. Hopefully my elaborations make sense. I live in a townhouse complex. We have 3 buildings and about 3-5 units per building. Every unit has cable connections however there's numerous inhabitants that have chosen satellite service over cable. Facing south though there's a row of trees that would prevent any dishes to be mounted on the balcony. Fortunately the home owners association has been pretty liberal about dishes on common ground and thus has allowed some dishes to be mounted on the roof. All dishes on the roof though should not be visible from common ground. For most of them that is the case. There's a new dish though up there that cannot go behind the roof and therefore is visible. Some of the owners now have a problem with that.

I have some experience with satellites from the time I lived in Europe and did all my dish installs myself. Thus I have been tasked to look into some options. What I would like to do is:

- Have all dish network services consolidated to one superdish that serves the whole complex.
- Have all DirectTV dishes consolidated to one dish as well and serve the whole complex.

Now some of the buildings are separated from each other and I think you cannot run cables from one building to another without going down to the ground. So the cable lenghts will be quite long.

I think the whole thing can be accomplished with a number of switches specific to the network provider (I'm familiar with Dish network so e.g. a number of DP34 switches). I think though that I need signal amplifiers to get over cable length issues. I have not seen such amplifiers though. Can someone point me to the right direction here?

I hope this made sense and curious to your thoughts. Are there similar problems / solutions out there?

regards,

Maxim

 

[HCI]

It can be done but it may be complicated if you split between Dish and Direct. For both Dish and Direct you can cascade the the right multiswitches, You can also use power passing splitters compined with the switches to accomplish a large scale distribution also.

Were you may run into problems is if people want HD. Well use Directv for example, When local HD programming becomes available in your area you will need an AT9 for the folks that want the service.

Like I said it can be done but if you are splitting the service between both company's it is going to be a big job and is going to cost more than you probably want to spend.

 

[Claude Greiner]

Im a dealer and I have delt with this very same issue with several home owners associations.

What you want to do is possible, heck you can even have one Dish serve several buildings with potentially hundreds of taps. You can even run underground conduits to link several buildings together.

The problem is that the additional switches and amplifiers cost money, and nobody wants to pay for it. Everyone I speak to has this attitude that it should be FREE, because afterall they are paying a monthly service fee to have the DISH.

The home owners feel the association will pay, and the association feels that the satellite company should pay, so therefore nouthing gets done about it and the problem grows as more people move in and install their own Dishes.

The sad thing is that these associations got money, they will pay several thousand dollars for landscaping, they will pay to replace side walks and cement, and will even pay to have a small staff, a club house and even a swimming pool but when it comes to Cable and Satellite they will not spend a dime!

The other thing that pisses me off about these associations is that they want everything hidden. They don't even want wires showing on the outside of the building, they want everything done as an interior wall Fish. I was sitting down with one manager and he was telling me how if I wanted "Their" businss, they didn't want to see any cables on the outside of the buildings. No Problem, got out my calculator, added it up and came up with several thousand dollars in additional labor to pre-wire several buildings with all interior wall fishes. He then mentioned that cable didn't charge him that much, and I pointed out that all the cable was also ran on the exterior of the building. He changed his tune really fast on that one.

The other thing that pisses me off is that it is possible to do a FREE install, but in order to do that we have to have X amount of subscribers. They never want to completley get rid of the cable company and want Dish simply as a 2nd option. You just can't make any money with 10-20% penitration, the cable needs to go so you can get that up to around 80% and eliminate the possibility of competion and churn from the cable company.

Seriously, im at the point when I get a call from an apartment complex or homeowners association I don't even waste my time. I give them a rough estimate over the phone and if they are ready to spend some money I'll go out and look at it. If not, it aint even worth wasting my time looking at it.

But other than that, I have done it in the past and its not hard to design a system to run off of a single Dish.