How far away do you guys have your dish's from the receivers?

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Wms-Stargate

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Dec 9, 2016
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I have such a sweet spot on top of a hill on the back of my property. I was wondering what a realistic distance should be? I also wonder how far away can I really setup my dishes? Can I use any kind of booster? I mean if I really needed to put the dishes two football fields away?
 
depends on many different factors,

but generally speaking anything over 200ft should have an amp/booster, and the booster should be within 100 feet of the dish(es),

i am pretty lucky with my current setup, my cable is only about 30 feet to my motorized KU dish
 
So only 1 booster can be installed? 200 foot isn't gonna do me any good. I guess i better break out the 100ft tape measure and see how far it really is.

Thanks for the RG-11 tip. Looks like a couple 1000ft rolls of the stuff are on eBay for under 200.00
It does worry me what brand the stuff is tho...

Thank's guys!
 
The first problem you will notice with a long cable run is the inability to switch polarity, because the voltage has dropped too much to properly control the LNB. RG-11 can give you a little greater range but I don't think even it and a booster will handle two football fields distance, though I may be wrong.

If the dish is really that far away and if you can get power to the dish location it might be better to put some kind of digital tuner at the dish and then send the signal back to your home using wifi, underground cat 5/6, or fiber optics. I saw a link to this article a couple days ago but I am not sure how workable it would be in the USA:
What is a SAT>IP server, and can you use one in North America?

An alternative would be to build a weatherproof enclosure of some kind and put a small computer with DVB-S2 tuners inside and run something like TVHeadEnd on it, but you would still need power and a connection to your local network. And if it's a wired connection (underground cat 5 or cat 6) then you need excellent lightning protection at both ends (especially at your house) and that can be a little expensive. For a dish on a hilltop that could potentially act as a lightning rod, I'd definitely spend the little bit of extra money and use a fiber link, then you only have to worry about lightning hitting your power connection and a good surge suppressor may help. If it were me I'd also run a heavy ground wire from your dish back to your home's ground (coming off your electric meter) but I would add a few ground rods along the way, maybe one about 4 or 5 feet from the dish and then another every hundred or couple hundred feet until you get to your home's ground, so that if lightning does hit the dish it has an easier path to ground through your ground wire and rods before it gets into the house. Lightning is nasty stuff and a dish on a hilltop, especially if it's the highest object in the surrounding terrain, just seems like much too tempting a target during an electrical storm. So as much as possible I'd try to isolate it from your home's wiring.
 
Usually, an inline amp degrades the signal more than it improves. If installing one, buy a quality unit with low amplification noise. It should be installed at the dish so it is amplifying the highest signal to noise ratio.

A fixed, single satellite dish (no switches or inline motor) will work fine using quad shield (or better) copper core RG6 at 500-600'+ feet. Even if a receiver is outputting the outbound 22KHz/DiSEqC commands at the protocol amplitude level, motor and switch control are unreliable on long coax runs.

Btw... my satellite dish is 1/2 mile away. Use Ubiquity WiFi point to point link to watch and control. :)
 
Btw... my satellite dish is 1/2 mile away. Use Ubiquity WiFi point to point link to watch and control. :)
Holy smokes! I'm wondering how effective the WiFi might be in bad weather areas, like heavy Winter snows for instance. I wouldn't want to have to trek a one mile round trip to clean the snow off the dish either. Heck, I hate lumbering 60 feet in 2 feet of snow to get to mine. :eek
 
I have about a 30 foot run of RG/6 to the Ku dish. Only really need about 20 feet but keep an extra 10 in case I want to experiment.
 
The first problem you will notice with a long cable run is the inability to switch polarity, because the voltage has dropped too much to properly control the LNB. RG-11 can give you a little greater range but I don't think even it and a booster will handle two football fields distance, though I may be wrong.

If the dish is really that far away and if you can get power to the dish location it might be better to put some kind of digital tuner at the dish and then send the signal back to your home using wifi, underground cat 5/6, or fiber optics. I saw a link to this article a couple days ago but I am not sure how workable it would be in the USA:
What is a SAT>IP server, and can you use one in North America?

An alternative would be to build a weatherproof enclosure of some kind and put a small computer with DVB-S2 tuners inside and run something like TVHeadEnd on it, but you would still need power and a connection to your local network. And if it's a wired connection (underground cat 5 or cat 6) then you need excellent lightning protection at both ends (especially at your house) and that can be a little expensive. For a dish on a hilltop that could potentially act as a lightning rod, I'd definitely spend the little bit of extra money and use a fiber link, then you only have to worry about lightning hitting your power connection and a good surge suppressor may help. If it were me I'd also run a heavy ground wire from your dish back to your home's ground (coming off your electric meter) but I would add a few ground rods along the way, maybe one about 4 or 5 feet from the dish and then another every hundred or couple hundred feet until you get to your home's ground, so that if lightning does hit the dish it has an easier path to ground through your ground wire and rods before it gets into the house. Lightning is nasty stuff and a dish on a hilltop, especially if it's the highest object in the surrounding terrain, just seems like much too tempting a target during an electrical storm. So as much as possible I'd try to isolate it from your home's wiring.

Man you guy's are off the hook! It will take me a while to digest all the information in this post. I can tell you now that i have power on top of the hill. VIA my well house/head, however i can't remember whats run up there but 12/2 or 14/2 seems likely. I also have a dual xeon work station sitting here with 24 gig's on non ecc memory. The station is not doing anything at the moment. I think I have 950watt power supply in it and I also have a PPOE switch sitting here as well.

Like I said above i will need to study up a bit on both yours, ancient and brian posts. Man how does "Lone Gun" say it? I haven't had this much fun & something about clothes!

You guys rock!
Bill
 
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My dishes range from 60 to about 200 from the recievers and I use Rg6 for both the Ku and Cband dishes and not seen any issues. A lot will depend on the quality of the cable you buy along with the installation on the connectors.

Sent from my SM-T210R using the SatelliteGuys app!
 
Man you guy's are off the hook! It will take me a while to digest all the information in this post. I can tell you now that i have power on top of the hill. VIA my well house/head, however i can't remember whats run up there but 12/2 or 14/2 seems likely. I also have a dual xeon work station sitting here with 24 gig's on non ecc memory. The station is not doing anything at the moment. I think I have 950watt power supply in it and I also have a PPOE switch sitting here as well.

Well just a few points about your power feed: 12/2 could be adequate, and 14/2 might be depending on the length of the cable and the size of the water pump, but there a few considerations.

First, are you sending 120V or 240V to the pump? Many residential water pumps run on 240V. That alone would not necessarily be a show stopper since many computer power supplies will run just fine on 240 volts, though you may need to flip a switch on the power supply to select the higher voltage, and get a 240V outlet and a compatible plug - it would be illegal to use a 120V outlet for 240V due to the risk of someone plugging in a 120V-only device. But that may not be the biggest problem. The pump is turned on and off by a pressure switch. If that switch is up at the pump you're golden, you just tap in to the power line before the switch. But if it's down at the house, and often it is put there so it doesn't freeze in the winter, then you don't have continuous power coming up that line, instead you only have it when the pump is actually operating. So that's the first thing I'd check, if you're not already sure of how it works.

Also if all you have is 240V then if you have any networking equipment up there you'll likely need to replace the "wall wart" transformer(s) with one(s) of similar output, but 240V input (unless the "wall wart" is a switching type supply rated for input voltages up to 240 or 250 volts - some are, but don't assume that, check the label). You could just get a big step-down transformer to take 240V down to 120V and then run your 120V equipment off that, but the dual conversion will be less efficient and your electric bill may be a bit higher doing it that way. Since most of the world outside the USA and Canada uses 240V as standard household voltage, it shouldn't be hard to find transformers that will work.

There is, of course, the highly illegal and potentially very unsafe option of using one leg of the 240V feed and the bare ground wire that is (hopefully) in your feed cable to get 120V. Please don't do that. For one thing it assumes the ground wire is correctly connected all the way back to your breaker box, for another if you have any GFI breakers or outlets in your home you can cause a load imbalance that will cause them to trip, possibly even if they are on different circuits. But maybe you have one of those water pumps that actually runs on 120V, in that case if it's only 14/2 I'd worry that the pump is using the full 15 Amperes (the maximum size breaker when 14/2 is used) and that any additional load would trip the breaker. With 12/2 (and especially if it's a 240V circuit) I would hope there is enough headroom there that your computer can operate without causing so much load that it trips the breaker, but you won't know until you test it.

One other consideration is that heavy duty motors such as well motors can cause serious "kickback" voltages when they shut off, so you will want some VERY good surge protection between your electronics and that power line, and I am not talking about a cheapo surge suppressor strip from Best Buy or Staples (which wouldn't work with 240V anyway). It's probably worth it to drop a couple hundred or so on excellent surge suppression if your only option is to get power from a "noisy" line that has power spikes whenever the pump shuts off. Another option would be to use a UPS that is totally isolating (the commercial power is used ONLY to charge the battery, and the equipment is constantly fed from the battery only and never directly from the commercial power) but those can get rather costly too, as I understand it. If you are really into electronics maybe you could even build a 240V or 120V battery charging circuit that charges a deep-discharge 12V battery or 24V battery, then build appropriate circuits that convert the battery voltage to whatever voltages your equipment actually needs, but I really can't see any of that being less expensive (or frustrating if you're not an electronics genius) than just running a totally new 120V circuit up from your house. And that might wind up being your best option, particularly if you plan to dig another trench for fiber cable anyway. Unlike Cat5 or Cat6, there's no problem running fiber optic cable in the same conduit or plastic pipe as an electrical cable, since it's totally non-conductive. I can certainly understand not wanting to do that, since nobody hates digging trenches more than I, but I'd also hate to see your equipment damaged by voltage spikes from your pump.
 
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Here is the new pump I put in last Christmas. I have all the pictures from the install just need to find them. I seem to remember one run of the yellow jacketed 12/2. I am ok with some electrical stuff. As i am always rebuilding arcade games with switching power supplies and such.

Thank you for all of your time.
 

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Here is the new pump I put in last Christmas. I have all the pictures from the install just need to find them. I seem to remember one run of the yellow jacketed 12/2. I am ok with some electrical stuff. As i am always rebuilding arcade games with switching power supplies and such.

Thank you for all of your time.
That confirms my suspicion; the label says 230V, which is in the 220-240V range. And being a submersible, I would be very surprised if the pressure switch is not at the house, which means there's only power on that circuit when the pump is actually running. Sorry about that, but I think your best option will be running a new power line for 120V and connecting it to its own circuit breaker in the breaker box. There may be some ways to hack around that but in the end I suspect you'd wind up spending more and having a less reliable setup than if you just ran a new wire for the computer and network equipment.
 
If there is a water tank at the pump house the pressure switch should be there.

Oops Wms- Stargate posted before I could type this out.
 
My furthest dish is 200 feet away from the switching and another 100 feet from there inside the house.This is with good quality RG6 and Beldon compression fittings....I do have a 500 foot roll of RG11 but really see no need to use it..Skimping on good compression fittings and improperly installed is ur enemy not the length of the run!
 
No the switch sits right under the well lid on top of the air tank. It's all combined at the well man. I'm good!

Great! Then all you need to do is make sure your computer and/or networking equipment gets the correct voltages and that you minimize the amount of "kickback" voltage from the pump that reaches your equipment. Perhaps if you talk to an electrician they could advise you on the best way to do that. I would suspect something such as this would work but I don't know; it might be too little or it might be overkill, and I am not an electrician so I'm not even completely sure it could be used for this purpose:

Square D by Schneider Electric HEPD80 Home Electronics Protective Device

If you do talk to an electrician don't get high-pressured into something that makes a lot of profit for them but that has bad reviews online. I once had a guy quote me on a whole-house backup generator and he "helpfully" gave me a slick piece of marketing material for a very fancy looking and expensive surge suppressor. When I looked it up online it had quite a few bad reviews; basically people said it was no better than no protection at all. So that guy didn't get to install the surge suppressor OR the generator. I figured if he was trying to push expensive crap on me for the one, his generator was probably overpriced crap as well.
 
If there is a water tank at the pump house the pressure switch should be there.

Perhaps where the OP lives, but around here they typically either put the water tank inside the house on the lowest level, and put the pressure switch there, or if there is no place to put a water tank inside then they use an epoxy-coated underground tank buried well below the frost line, and still put the switch in the house. The OP lives in a much warmer climate, so it doesn't surprise me that he'd have a pump house with the tank and switch inside. You don't see that around here because the tank would be a solid block of ice by sometime in December, if not sooner! I've never lived in a place where it mostly stays above freezing all winter so I've never actually seen a pump house of the type you're discussing here, so my comment was based on what I see around here and probably not applicable to warmer areas. Sorry about that.
 
All great advise man and you certainly have the wheels turning. So to speak! I will certainly check out that Square D too. I like their products.

Thanks Again...
Bill
 
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