FTA small Headend for a campground

[pdwood]

Looking to put a small head end together for a church camp that sits on about 800 acres in Oklahoma.

We are about to start building a 45 room hotel that will have meeting areas, cafe, nice lobby, and about 500 seat chapel.

Going to have OTA, and our inhouse channels that use a CATV rack mount Modulator. All of these signals will be combined using a rack mount combiner.

Really would like to find a receiver that is "always on" That way if their is power failure, when power is restored the receiver will be back to the correct channel. Would really like something that is rack mount but not a big deal if not.

Each sat box would be hooked up to its own catv modulator into the combiner.

Any suggestions?

Thanks Paul Wood

 

[SatelliteAV]

GEOSATpro DSR-R100b. The unit is designed to be left on 24/7 and also has a great automatic maintenance mode to reset overnight. We sell thousands of the DSR-R100b units each year that are used for small head ends, insertions and local broadcasting.

Give us a call. We can source everything that you need for a head end system.

 

[TRG]

Brian, Your dish/receiver combo is a great value. Satellite AV, LLC - Satellite Broadcaster Support and Equipment Distribution

 

[Mr Tony]

If you are looking for a commercial type setup I HIGHLY suggest calling SatelliteAV. They have the receivers and the knowledge to get ya up and running

 

[dfergie]

If you are looking for a commercial type setup I HIGHLY suggest calling SatelliteAV. They have the receivers and the knowledge to get ya up and running

That and he is just a good person!

 

[rv1pop]

Unless you have back up power everywhere... where people will be watching (RVs, etc.), always on - battery back-up - is not really desirable. Too much maintenance. Brian will correct me if I am wrong, but some of these units reboot and come on on power restoration. I agree with Iceberg, SatelliteAV is the only place I know of whose main 'reason for being' is to help do this kind of installs.

If you are off grid, most or all of the time, so you are on emergency power, or 98% plus power demand, then I can give advice on that part of the project. All RVs here must be self contained. Right now each building has its own receiver, and is limited to 3 amps AC power from the inverter.... Fuses are "hidden", and really, (At this time - until inverter is replaced) I have only 5 amps AC for the whole property except when running the generator. (about 45 Amps @ 12VDC. and 9 of that for water boost pump.)

 

[TRG]

Unless you have back up power everywhere... where people will be watching (RVs, etc.), always on - battery back-up - is not really desirable. Too much maintenance. Brian will correct me if I am wrong, but some of these units reboot and come on on power restoration. I agree with Iceberg, SatelliteAV is the only place I know of whose main 'reason for being' is to help do this kind of installs.

If you are off grid, most or all of the time, so you are on emergency power, or 98% plus power demand, then I can give advice on that part of the project. All RVs here must be self contained. Right now each building has its own receiver, and is limited to 3 amps AC power from the inverter.... Fuses are "hidden", and really, (At this time - until inverter is replaced) I have only 5 amps AC for the whole property except when running the generator. (about 45 Amps @ 12VDC. and 9 of that for water boost pump.)

What kind of Internet service are you using?

 

[Mr Tony]

Brian will correct me if I am wrong, but some of these units reboot and come on on power restoration

correct. They reboot and go back to the last channel you had up

 

[pdwood]

Right now we do not have a dedicated internet connection yet. We we have special events we have 3g/4g Verizon phone that is tethered to a netbook. From the netbook we have created an ethernet bridge to an access point/router that re broadcasts the wifi signal out using directional antennas on a 50ft tower ontop of the hill. The tower also has a cell phone repeater. Works pretty well but it is not a permanent solution. But basically we just bridge the tethered & lan connection. I want the new exede sat service really great speeds 12 down and 4-5 up. But limited on bandwidth the max is 25 gigs. We like media stream stuff live, not real feasible.

But we can get wifi out of a town about 15 miles away with speeds of 6-8down megs 3 megs up. Not too bad. But the only draw back is we need to have a 130ft tower. So if any one knows of a tower for cheap please let me know that is all we need to get unlimited wifi. Our campground has power throughout the area.

 

[harshness]

Are you going to modulate each OTA station on its own cable channel? I'm thinking this may be the most complicated (and expensive) part of the whole endeavor.

 

[pdwood]

Nope The over the air will be just mixed into the combiner. Only modulated channels with be the ones we are grabbing from the sat system. I would say maybe 10 SD Channels.

That rack mount receiver is nice. Eventually as time and money I do want to get the zeevee HD modulator but we will only be able to afford 1 or 2 of these.

 

[SatelliteAV]

OTA ATSC will not distribute well with only an antenna, combiner and amplifier. I would highly discourage you from attempting to distribute the OTA ATSC terrestrial channels. You will have nothing but frustration. OTA channels are normally converted to QAM or dumbed down to SD and modulated as analog NTSC channels for distribution.

The least expensive way to provide distribution is to go all analog. Typically 4 or 5 channels can be distributed analog vs the cost of distributing a single digital channel. There are less expensive digital modulators and solutions than the ZeeVee when you consider digital distribution.

 

[pdwood]

what other modulators would you suggest? We have used the atsc & local sd channels in the past and currently using that set up at our home church. It actually works pretty well with a wideband amp. We get all of the locals with our 5 sd feeds that we have in house. The trick we have found is to put the in house channels on open channels not to mess with the OTA signals.

I have had real good luck with the pico, holland, bonde tonger. We are currently using the holland sd modulators. But the longest run we currently have is<200 feet.

When we get ready to build at the camp ground, going to get a media converter. Takes the rf signal from the catv system to fiber optic then you have a fiber to copper decoder. At the end of the fiber to copper you put the standard amps & taps. The HD modulator(s) would be used for announcement channel from the pc & 1 for an HD Sat box for special events.
Kinda unique set up. It is a church camp but we starting to have company picnics out there from various companies. One of those things we want to get the best system we can afford. But need to be good stewards of the money. The camp is brand new, so been told we want to make it right the first time.

I tell you we also have a t2 quad modulator. Really would like to find a few more of them. They are rack mount and can take svideo input and are freq agile.

 

[SatelliteAV]

It is never a good idea to receive a terrestrial signal, amplify and distribute on the same frequency. You will have success on small plants like you mentioned, but you will not have good results with longer runs and multiple distribution amps.

ZeeVee is a great cost effective encoder for analog source, but there are many solutions for other types of QAM encoding. Here are a few.
Source - ASTC: Blonder Tongue AQT or the Blonder Tongue DHDP or Cabletronix CT-DDC/CT-DUC

Source ASI: Blonder Tongue AQM or Drake TMQAM (interfaces nicely with our WellAV UMH800 Satellite receiver with ASI out). Ran across this deal on Ebay recently. Seems to be an excellent price! LOT of 3 Scientific Atlanta D9477-1 IF -> QAM Dual QAM Modulator D9477 | eBay

Good luck with your project. Let us know if we could provide any assistance or products.

 

[wallyhts]

These will work also. They just need to be set to standalone mode.



Scientific Atlanta D9477-1 MQAM Modulator

http://bit.ly/KVkkJm (eBay link)

 

[SatelliteAV]

These will work also. They just need to be set to standalone mode. Scientific Atlanta D9477-1 MQAM Modulator

At that price, I might just have to buy a few for around the house distribution! LOL! $24 + $800 = 1 HD satellite channel distributed to every TV in the house..... Hmmmmm......

 

[wallyhts]

Yup, I have a few running one is for the PBS hd mux on 125. I picked up an gi se-1000 mpeg2 encoder that I use on the other.

But don't have an ird that's s2 with asi out.

Super fun to play with. How can you beat your own QAM headend in the basement. I guess I am a geek.

 

[harshness]

You will have nothing but frustration. OTA channels are normally converted to QAM or dumbed down to SD and modulated as analog NTSC channels for distribution.

The biggest headache being that no TV will tune both UHF and QAM without changing tuner modes (AIR & CATV). It needs to be one or the other or users will go crazy.

 

[SatelliteAV]

The biggest headache being that no TV will tune both UHF and QAM without changing tuner modes (AIR & CATV). It needs to be one or the other or users will go crazy.

Many TVs will scan both ATSC and QAM with single scan (my Samsung TVs have this ability).

Agreed that it is unusual to have both types mixed on a single cable and many users may have a TV that cannot scan both simultaneously or not know that they must scan both modes.

 

[rv1pop]

I thought that was not true. My $99. 12VDC LED/LCD TV does say it will detect and show both. No cable here to test it though! Only 20 inch, a little klutzy in the operation, but one of the best investments I have made.