Firstly the only, and the highest, place on the property with a reasonably uncluttered view of the sky is the workshop, which is a good 30 metres from the house. So the dish and antennae have been mounted there, and cabling run down to the house. Eventually I'll have to dig a trench and lay a protective pipe with the cabling inside. It'll also give me the opportunity to route some networking cable as well, but that's for another time.
Secondly I wanted the widest possible range of free-to-air tv channels available. So that means tapping into FreeView, FreeSat, and a handful of European satellites as well. I chose Eutelsat Hotbird at 13E and SES Astra at 19E as they transmit a wide variety of European channels, as well as SES Astra at 28E which provides FreeSat.
Lastly I wanted tv points in 5 rooms in the house, and maybe a couple in the workshop. I want at least a single satellite and a terrestrial point in most rooms, and a double satellite point in the lounge, master bedroom and cinema room (aka the 3rd bedroom) to cater for twin-tuner recorders. So that would be about 10 satellite points and 7 terrestrial points in total. And I wanted any point to be able to view any channel, so each point is effectively independent of the others.
As I wanted to pick up multiple satellites the bigger the dish the better. Anything up to 1 metre diameter doesn't require planning permission in the UK, and I settled on a 90cm Triax TD88 as Triax also produce a multi-LNB holder for their dishes. I mounted this as high as I could on the workshop wall, using a heavy duty pole mount.
There are two main options for distributing satellite tv to multiple rooms, DiSEqC switches and multi-output LNBs, or a multiswitch and quatro LNBs. Multi-output LNBs generally have 1, 2, 4 or 8 outputs so wouldn't be able to meet my need for 10 satellite points. I therefore went the multiswitch route and bought 3 Inverto Black Ultra quatro LNBs and a Triax TMS 17x12T multiswitch. For a bit of stretch capacity the 17x12T supports up to 4 satellites via quatro LNBs and provides 12 independent outputs. It also has a terrestrial TV/DAB/FM input, which is combined and piped down all of the 12 outputs.
I mounted the multiswitch on the wall inside the workshop so that it remains dry, and knocked out a brick in the wall in order to route cables from the dish. I cut 4 sections of 32mm poly plumbing pipe, and mortared these into the hole left by the removed brick. I then connected the LNBs to the multiswitch using Primesat Hamburg quad 7mm cabling with waterproof Cablecon UltraEase 5.1 F-connectors. These cables loop down from the LNBs before entering the poly pipes, so that any rain drips off the cables outside, rather than running inside and onto the multiswitch.
Finally as a test I've run a Webro WF100 7mm cable from the multiswitch across the garden, through the flower beds, into the lounge and into the back of my Humax FoxSat HDR set top box. A quick (not!) retune of the STB to pick up the channels from all 3 satellites and we now have over 1000 free-to-air tv channels on hand. Just in time for 24 hour coverage of the Le Mans endurance race on Eurosport Deutschland. Sweet!
That's stage 1 complete. For stage 2 I'll be adding antennae for terrestrial tv, DAB and FM to the workshop wall, and feeding those into the multiswitch as well. Stage 3 will see me digging a trench and burying a lot of WF100 in the ground. And finally stage 4 will be installing the tv points into each room, before the plasterers come to redo our walls. (There's a possible stage 5 as well, which is installing a second dish on a motorised mount so that we can tune in to any other other satellites that are up there...)
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