"jason" wrote in message
om...
Here's what I have. I've got a family room downstairs with one Direct
TV satellite receiver, and another receiver in the upstairs family
room. What I want to do is to run multiple lines from the receiver
downstairs to an additional 3 tv's (plus my wide-screen of which it's
hooked up to now by an S-video line), and run the satellite receiver
that's upstairs to an additional 3 tv's as well. I've purchased a
4-way distribution amplifier as a test pilot for the downstairs line
as well as a diplexer. My thought process was that I could bring the
satellite line out of the receiver and into the 4-way amplifier, and
then run 4 lines out of that into each individual tv. While watching
channel 3 on each of my tv's, all of the tv's should pick up the one
channel being watched from the satellite receiver. I also purchased
the diplexer (test pilot as well) from Best Buy as one of the
associates suggested that I could run the 'rabbit style' antenna into
one side of the diplexer, and the satellite line into the other (this
requiring a diplexer for each individual tv). According to plan, if I
was watching channel 3 I would pick up the satellite signal and if I
was watching any other channel it would be a standard antenna feed
(letting the family have the option of watching other local channels
without having to watch what the original tv was watching). Keep in
mind that I do pay the additional monthly fees for the local channels.
Nothing has gone as planned. I've had the Direct TV for over a year
now, and I wanted to install satellite on all of these TV's before I
finished the rest of my basement. A few questions:

What am I doing wrong? Is this possible without buying additional
receivers for each TV? If I do buy additional receivers, will I have
to pay the $4.95/month service fee? Is there something else that I
need to purchase to make my game plan work?

Please let me know as I thought I had this "perfect plan", but nothing
seems to be working. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks-Jason

If you want to watch the same program on all the TVs then using an amplified
splitter on the output of the satellite receiver and feeding some number of
TVs should work fine -- virtually any number of TVs could be fed with the
correct combination of amplifiers and splitters. What results are you
seeing? Have you taken into account that any one of the critical components
in the system migh be bad "out of the box"?

Oh, and if the signal levels are wildly different a simple diplexer might
not give you the results you are seeking -- you might want to leave it out
for testing purposes. Even using selective channel inserters it gets tricky
sometimes and adjacent channel interference is often a problem.
--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]

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