DIYbanter - View Single Post - How Dish Network Setup 4 Receivers in a House?

wrote:
It's not just a cap; it is a metal connector with a 75 ohm resistor
inside it to act as a load when a TV is not connected to the outlet.
Splitters are designed for specific loads on the outputs. If a load
is missing, all kinds of ugly things happen such as reflections, huge
losses at some frequencies etc. etc. etc.

Thanks for explaining why we may need a "cap" on unused TV connectors
in a splitter. Currently, I only plan on replacing DirecTV with Dish
Network, and Dish Network will have four cables coming in to connect to
four receivers; this means there will not be any splitter involved, and
there will not be any unused connector. Therefore, I don't need to
worry about "cap" for now.

Two comments: the signal coming from the Dish is digital. Getting the
high-quality cables you mentioned before is probably not going to give
you better picture quality. Second, the "splitter" is not really a plain
splitter as you would use for an analog cable signal. It's more like an
NxM switch that allows each tuner to connect to any LNB on any of the dishes.
This could mean that the "cap" (terminator) is not really needed, but more
importantly: if you were to connect each of the 4 cables coming from the
dishes directly to an input on a tuner, then each tuner would be limited as
to what channels can be watched on it. You probably don't want that.