Options for TV feed (multiple rooms)

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itxtme

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# 17965 19-Dec-2007 22:35

Hi there,

I am currently trying to work out the best way to get a feed from my current sky decoder to another room in the house. Let me try and explain my setup and you can all give me ways to make this work

What i currently have is a coax cable from the sattelite into my lounge. This is split with a splitter that sends one feed to the sky decoder and the other feed to freeview in my bedroom. Now what i want is to send a feed via a coax cable to another room around 20 metres of the sky decoder feed ( so no not a 3 way splitter). I have hooked my sky decoder up via the AV cables on the back of the decoder..

I have sky digital BTW, with one of the newer decoders

Anybody got some ideas??

cyril7

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# 100958 20-Dec-2007 07:31

I assume you want to send a feed of the Sky box to another room. The sky box has an RF out on the rear, simply pipe that over a bit of RG6 to the other room, you should find the Sky feed on UHF Ch38 although this can be changed in the advanced menu setting. You could also combine the RF out of the FreeView box (assuming it has one ) and have both the Sky feed and FreeView feed appear at the remote location

Cyril

sbiddle

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# 100959 20-Dec-2007 07:43

If you don't want to run cable then there are some good prices on wireless TV transmitters. Just avoid the 2.4Ghz units if you have a WiFi system or 2.4Ghz cordless phone or use Bluetooth as it will interfere. Jaycar sell some good 5.8Ghz units.

richms

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# 100984 20-Dec-2007 10:10

If the price of the jaycar units is offputting, there are some 12 channel wireless senders on ebay.. friend got one and half the channels are not effected at all by wifi. Good power output too, so it actually has some penetration, not like the 10mW stuff that you usually see.

Richard rich.ms

kevthesparky

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# 101317 21-Dec-2007 22:40

Av senders are good but at the end of the day you cant beat a cabled solution.

richms

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# 101330 22-Dec-2007 00:03

So long as you dont include running the RF out of the box to another room in the definition of cabled.

You can get cheapish baluns on ebay to let you run av over cat-5 - much better option if you dont want to run numerous pieces of coax to take the signal.

Richard rich.ms

itxtme

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# 101425 22-Dec-2007 19:52

Thanks for the advice! Something for me to do after xmas ;) ill prob go with the cabled option

eXDee

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# 102521 2-Jan-2008 00:17

richms: So long as you dont include running the RF out of the box to another room in the definition of cabled.

You can get cheapish baluns on ebay to let you run av over cat-5 - much better option if you dont want to run numerous pieces of coax to take the signal.

I have around 100m of spare cat5-e (solid core UTP), does this mean i could run component + surround audio (coax one) over a bit of cat5? Or is it not good enough quality?

richms

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# 102523 2-Jan-2008 00:44

Yes, since digital out is 75ohm as well, you can just use a a 4 way balun like ebay listing 320200575221 - I have not found a cheap source of them in china yet that will do one offs

you need one at each end of the cable.

there are also hdmi over cat5e adaptors, but they are not cheap and need 2 cables, so pull a second one and later you can change them out when they become cheap since it will be better then a passive balun.

Theres also powered converters that will drive longer cables and have less loss, but once again, not too cheap at the moment.

Richard rich.ms

sloth

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# 102954 4-Jan-2008 19:16

Hi

I've got a similar situation (just got Sky installed yesterday). So, I've got the decoder downstairs. We opted to have another feed installed to a bedroom. However, I didn't expect that we'd then no longer receive normal TV channels on the bedroom TV! Essentially we're stuck with just the current channel that the decoder downstairs is on - not a lot of point in that really!
I don't understand too much about how this all works, but I thought that there was still an RF feed available? There's the RF In connection on the back of the decoder, with nothing plugged in to it.

Actually, the downstairs TV is now Sky-only as well. So how can I get the normal TV channels (via my aerial) on there as well?

hope that makes sense.

Oh yeh, when I had Sky in the UK I had an extra Sky remote with a sensor in another bedroom - this allowed me to change the channel on the decoder downstairs. Any idea if that's available here? Don't think it was an official Sky thing though!

richms

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# 102985 5-Jan-2008 00:17

yeah, skys solution to the digital channels crapping all over the rf out of the box is to not plug anything into the rf in. It has a hard time competing with the high noisefloor that a uhf antenna will bring in too so if you must use rf then the picture is much better without anything fed into the sky box.

If its just the VHF channels that you want in addition to the sky ones then plug your antenna into a combiner with the sky box in the uhf input and then take that to your splitter.

The myskys can have the second rf out enabled to power a sensor eye like they sell in the uk, and I think you can pick them up on ebay aussie for foxtel boxes (same one) - not aware of the non pvr ones taking ir signaling back down the coax cable. We are sky free now so I cant go look either.

Richard rich.ms