Help: HowTo - Two houses sharing one dish antenna

[jstowe]

I'm currently a DishNetwork subscriber and have a Dish500 antenna installed on my house. My mother (who lives approx 100' away) also wanted to subscribe, but her home is surrounded by very tall trees, most of which are owned by uncooperative neighbors. There is no place on her property where she can locate an dish antenna that will work.

Since she lives across the street from me, there is no way to physically run coax cable from my home to hers. Is there any way to allow her to somehow wirelessly share MY ANTENNA ONLY (essentially rebroadcasting the raw, undecoded signal received by the LNBs over a point-to-point wireless link)? I AM NOT ASKING IF SHE CAN SHARE MY ACCOUNT OR PROGRAMMING. She is willing to purchase a subscription to DishNetwork, receiver, smartcard, etc - everything she would have as a regular subscriber. She simply needs to get the raw signal from my antenna to an receiver on her property.

We have full line of sight between our houses. Are there any solutions for this type of situation (essentially rebroadcasting the raw, undecoded signal received by the LNBs over a point-to-point wireless link)?

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Pepper]

Some questions: How wide and how heavily traveled is the street? How big a town do you live in and how zealous is the local regulatory enforcement? Are there any culverts or drainage pipes available?

Reason I'm asking these, I have seen cable company wires left lying across streets in some local neighborhoods for months. You might could get away with such a setup for a while, or maybe I've given you other (possibly stupid, use at your own discretion) ideas.

To answer your original question, probably technically feasible but at a ridiculously high cost.

Something much more feasible might be:
- locate the receiver in your house connected to your dish
- UHF remote at her house
- an extra big, probably mounted outdoor, receiving antenna for the UHF remote
- sort of amplification box to broadcast channel 3 or 4 from the receiver's RF output into an outdoor antenna.

This would probably get the signal across the street, assuming channels 3 and 4 are unused over the air in your area.

By the way, I'm not sure which penalties would be worse, violating FCC rules by effectively running your own TV station, or violating local codes by running the cable across/over/under the street. Neither is strictly legal.

 

[Big Bob]

.

-Sorry, didn't read previous thread. Still sleepy.

 

[SatinKzo]

Some questions: How wide and how heavily traveled is the street? How big a town do you live in and how zealous is the local regulatory enforcement? Are there any culverts or drainage pipes available?

Reason I'm asking these, I have seen cable company wires left lying across streets in some local neighborhoods for months. You might could get away with such a setup for a while, or maybe I've given you other (possibly stupid, use at your own discretion) ideas.

To answer your original question, probably technically feasible but at a ridiculously high cost.

Something much more feasible might be:
- locate the receiver in your house connected to your dish
- UHF remote at her house
- an extra big, probably mounted outdoor, receiving antenna for the UHF remote
- sort of amplification box to broadcast channel 3 or 4 from the receiver's RF output into an outdoor antenna.

This would probably get the signal across the street, assuming channels 3 and 4 are unused over the air in your area.

By the way, I'm not sure which penalties would be worse, violating FCC rules by effectively running your own TV station, or violating local codes by running the cable across/over/under the street. Neither is strictly legal.

It's only illegal when you get caught. But man that is all alot of work for TV. . You might want to look into vendors such as http://www.Blackbox.com as they might carry some of the specialized convertors for carrying video over long distances from a lower power source.

 

[DTVSatman]

It's only illegal when you get caught. But man that is all alot of work for TV. . You might want to look into vendors such as http://www.Blackbox.com as they might carry some of the specialized convertors for carrying video over long distances from a lower power source.

A pirate radio station is a pirate radio station. The FCC may not put a lot of effort into tracking down CBers with liner amps but I think they would get real interested in someone broadcasting on a TV frequency. Especially when the neighbors started seeing Dish channels on their TVs.
The entire frequency spectrum is allocated. What we use in WiFi, wireless phone jacks, etc. is a part of the spectrum allocated to unlicensed use. Cell phones have their bands of frequencies, ham radio have theirs and so on.
You may be hard-pressed to find a legal transmitter to carry a TV signal or a block of satellite frequencies. Coax may be your only choice unless someone sells a transmitter that converts channel 3/4 to an unallocated frequency and a receiver that converts the signal back to channel 3/4.
The idea of running coax under the street through a culvert may be the best option. BTW, does Dish have any restrictions on multiple dwellings sharing one dish?

 

[SatinKzo]

A pirate radio station is a pirate radio station. The FCC may not put a lot of effort into tracking down CBers with liner amps but I think they would get real interested in someone broadcasting on a TV frequency. Especially when the neighbors started seeing Dish channels on their TVs.
The entire frequency spectrum is allocated. What we use in WiFi, wireless phone jacks, etc. is a part of the spectrum allocated to unlicensed use. Cell phones have their bands of frequencies, ham radio have theirs and so on.
You may be hard-pressed to find a legal transmitter to carry a TV signal or a block of satellite frequencies. Coax may be your only choice unless someone sells a transmitter that converts channel 3/4 to an unallocated frequency and a receiver that converts the signal back to channel 3/4.
The idea of running coax under the street through a culvert may be the best option. BTW, does Dish have any restrictions on multiple dwellings sharing one dish?

Ok, some people aren't reading the sarcasm in the first part of my post... It was meant as a maybe-not-so-obvious joke...

 

[DTVSatman]

Ok, some people aren't reading the sarcasm in the first part of my post... It was meant as a maybe-not-so-obvious joke...

I can appreciate your sarcasm in a thread that reads like one big April Fool's joke.
In my ham radio days, I encountered people who actually believed "It's only illegal if you get caught." A CBer in the area with a fat amp was messing up everyone's TVs and cordless phones so the neighbors all looked at my big antenna and assumed it was me.
I should have taken the post in the way you meant it.

 

[SatinKzo]

No hard feelings. I was hoping people would obviously see that this is gonna be a big task to make it work and probably cost more money than it is worth. Plus the fact that anyone trying to broadcast is a licensed spectrum is breaking the law.

 

[lou_do]

We have full line of sight between our houses. Are there any solutions for this type of situation (essentially rebroadcasting the raw, undecoded signal received by the LNBs over a point-to-point wireless link)?
Any help is appreciated.

I use 2.4 gHz wireless transmitters/receivers to send the signal from my DirecTV receiver to any TV in my house. There are only two of us we we have two DirecTV hookups. I feed the Audio/Video from one of them to a transmitter and use receivers on TVs in the kitchen & bedrooms. They say it has a range of 400 feet, so house to house I am not sure how it would work. The more obstacles between the receiver and transmitter the lower the transmission distance is. The receiver/transmitters will also control an IR remote so you could leave the receiver box at your house and just have to put the receiver at hers. Then just plug the audio/video output of the receiver into her TV.

This is the units I am using: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=330515&is=REG

There are many different transmitter/receivers to do this, but this is what I use.