Best way to get Satellite TV from one room to another

In college my roomate and I just used a splitter, took the end of the coax that needed to traverse the apartment, tied a standard plastic grocery bag to the end of the cord, shoved it up in the air conditioning vents and turned the AC on. It took some coaxing (har har), but eventually the thing blew through.

But you were probably looking for a more technical answer than that.

 

Good question, I've been trying to figure this out myself. I have a couple of the splitters but I'm not sure how to hook them up. I had the DirecTV guy explain it to me but he made it sound much more complicated than I think it really is.

 

I've never used them before, but you could split the signal with a splitter. The problem then becomes that you'd have to run to the room with the "box" or "receiver" to change channels. To avoid that, you'd need something like an "ir blaster" or something to send the signal down to the room with the receiver if you're not there.

 

I just want to be able to share the signal between two different rooms, I don't care about being able to change the channel in both. Like if I have the Rockets game on the tv in the bedroom, I also want to be able to see it in my computer room.

 

If you want to see the same program in both rooms, split the cable that is going from the Satellite receiver to the TV. Of course there are several different types of cables that can accomplish this but the most common would be RCA. You can buy y-adapters for RCA cables and then send each on to the seperate TV. If it is S-video, I am not sure if there is a splitter for that or not. Probably so. Coax of course has splitters but I cant imagine anyone using that kind of connection to their tv anymore since the quality is so low.

 

Smeggy, I'm not sure what your asking, but it sounds like you need a multiplexer .. how many LNB is your dish?

 

I still use coax in my bedroom, which is the receiver I want to split off of. The quality is actually good on my 10 year old Sony Trinitron. That old girl still runs like a champ!

 

That should be really easy to do then. Just split the coax going to your TV from the receiver and send it to the other TV. Getting the coax to the other room is the most difficult part. Hopefully it is in the next room or somewhere that is easily accessible.

 

Ok, I found this page that explains the different methods to split sattelite signals. I'm trying to do the first option, and as you can see it sounds a lot more complicated than just splitting the line. Is all of this really necessary?

http://www.hometech.com/learn/dss.html

Single DSS Receiver, Modulated For Other TVs
The simplest (and least expensive) way to hook up DSS so that any TV can watch is shown in the figure to the right. With this setup, you can watch any antenna or cable station at any TV, and any TV can watch whatever is currently selected by the DSS receiver. Note that everyone will have to watch the same DSS program! Since there is only one receiver, there can only be one DSS program shown on the "in-house system" at a time.

A dual-LNB dish (or it could be a single in this case) feeds a diplexer turned backwards to merge the satellite signal with the antenna or cable signal onto a single cable. (Just be sure to connect the cables to the proper jacks on the diplexer.) At the outlet, another diplexer splits the satellite and antenna signals back out for the satellite receiver and TV to view.

Video and audio cables connect from the satellite receiver to a modulator where it is converted to an unused channel. The modulated signal is sent "upstream" to the headend where a combiner (a splitter turned backwards) joins the antenna/cable signals with the new channel. This combined signal is then split as many times as you have TV locations, including the location with the satellite receiver.

Note that you will probably need a little amplification of the non-satellite signal between the combiner and the splitter. And you may need amplification of the satellite signal before the first diplexer.