General question about DirecTV installation

[TraumaHound]

First off...great site and great forums. Heartwarming to see such good information and a vibrant online community.

A couple of years ago, my fiance and I had DirecTV installed at her house. We have three active receivers. (One dual tuner Tivo, one single tuner Tivo and an RCA DRD430RG).

The latter unit has been in the upstairs guest bedroom and has hardly been used. My office shares the wall with the guest bedroom. Approximately opposite of each other are two cable/coax wall plates. Since I am building a Freevo (Hauppauge PVR-150 with a serial channel changer), I decided to test the wall plate in my office by bringing the receiver over and hooking it up to a tv. To my mild disappointment, I got the "Waiting for Satellite Signal" message. After double checking the coax hookups I decided to go outside and check out the splitter in the cable box.

The splitter is a 2 to 4 splitter (I'm assuming taking each LNB off the dish and splitting it 4 ways (Receiver 1, Receiver 2, etc.) Two of the cables, I'm fairly certain, are tacked around the house and into the living room and this feeds our 2 input Tivo unit (we ran the two cables under our rug to the entertainment center.) The other two appear to be cable coaxes that I assume are running to different wall plates throughout the house. There were two free coax cables so I decided to undo 1 of the cables and try each of the free coax cables and see if it would "activate" or feed the wall plate in my office.

Unfortunately, this did not work out. Neither alternate cable appeared to feed the wall plate in my office. I did notice the original coax I unhooked cut the signal to the single tuner Tivo that we have in the master bedroom. So it appears my theory was somewhat correct that the black cables in the box run to different jacks throughout the house.

I have a service call scheduled for them to have a look at it. What I'm wondering is, from what I have described, does it sound like they are going to have to run another cable from the junction to the upstairs? Will they possibly unhook the guest bedroom wall plate and line it to the wall plate in my office? Anybody with experience willing to share what is typically done in this situation? What possible scenarios of work would be at play here.

I'm hoping any one of you will be able to set some expectations so I can talk intelligently with the technician about what I need to happen to get this wall plate working in my office.

Cheers,
MWF

 

[damaged]

You state a 'splitter' is in use, If you are indeed using a cable splitter it will never work, you need to use a multiswitch, satellite works alot different.

It sounds like you have a dual lnb dish (2 cables from dish into a multiswitch then (usually 4(or more)) outputs from switch to each tuner), and since you say you have 3 outputs in use (2 for dual tuner, 1 for single), then you probably have a 3x4 multiswitch already by the dish, if this is the case you would have one open output from the four avail (3 in use) on the multiswitch, you would have to run rg6 from it to the walljack (or direct to receiver), no splitters can be in the mix, nor anything used for cabletv like attenuators, boosters, or filters, the cable should also be rg6 (not rg5). It could also be a fault in the runs to the plates. The installer should know this.

Hope that helps.

 

[TraumaHound]

After reading through more of the forum topics, I'm fairly certain you are correct about the "multiswitch". (A noob nomenclature misfire on my part).

There are indeed 2 inputs from the dish, then 4 outs from the multiswitch which are all occupied with the current setup (1 dual tuner Tivo, 1 single tuner Tivo and the old RCA tuner). I was attempting to unhook 1 of the outs and try two of the "free" cables in the box. I was hoping that one of these two cables ran to the wall jack in my office but that apparently doesn't seem to be the case.

The way I understood it, this junction box (before DirecTV was in the picture) had a total of 4 coax cables running to various parts of the house. The initial installer unplugged two of them to run two RG6 cables around the house and into the living room for our dual tuner Tivo (I had to re-tack them underneath to the soffit as the installer did a pretty sloppy job.) I'm assuming that the other two receivers "borrowed" two of the 4 pre-existing "runs" to the master bedroom and the guest bedroom leaving two of the cables unused. I'm also understanding that in order for my assumption to be correct, these borrowed runs would have to be RG6. I'm guessing that is the case because unplugging one of the "old" cables cut the signal to our single-tuner Tivo in the master bedroom (opposite side of the house from the junction box).