Quick question on Coaxial cable

[patmahe]

Putting up a freewiew satellite dish yesterday. Used satellite coax cable to go from dish into the attic and then linked it to an existing standard coax cable which runs to a room downstairs. For whatever reason we are not getting a signal in the room downstairs.

Are the two types of coax cable compatible or are we likely to be doing something else wrong?

[TooLateForAName]

Lets rule out the obvious first -

Is the dish pointed the right way? How do you know?

How are you connecting the cable at the TV end - You are connecting to a sat receiver ?

How have you joined the cables?

In general standard coax is crap quality compared to the stuff for satellite/digital. I'd run proper cable all the way.


technically freeview is using a tv aerial, freesat is using a dish

Edited by TooLateForAName on Monday 12th July 09:31

[Le TVR]

Both coax will be standard 75 ohm types so there is no compatibility problem in terms of matching. The only difference is likely to be how lossy the old coax is compared to very low loss satellite coax.

[cjs]

Yes you can use the standard 'aerial' co-ax. Not ideal but it will work. As said above, how do you know you are on the correct satellite and have a signal?

[patmahe]

cjs said:

Yes you can use the standard 'aerial' co-ax. Not ideal but it will work. As said above, how do you know you are on the correct satellite and have a signal?

We know because we ran a length of satellite cable directly from the dish to the decoder box and had a perfect picture on the TV, we then joined the Satellite cable and normal coax using basically a connector and a port (not sure of the proper names) when the normal coax cable is plugged into the box we get no signal.

[Le TVR]

Time to check the DC continuity of that normal coax. The LNB is powered by the coax.

[cjs]

patmahe said:

cjs said:

Yes you can use the standard 'aerial' co-ax. Not ideal but it will work. As said above, how do you know you are on the correct satellite and have a signal?

We know because we ran a length of satellite cable directly from the dish to the decoder box and had a perfect picture on the TV, we then joined the Satellite cable and normal coax using basically a connector and a port (not sure of the proper names) when the normal coax cable is plugged into the box we get no signal.

It is not going through a wall socket at the TV end is it? You should use twist on 'F' connectors to join the two cables, same as on the LNB and Sat receiver and a barrel coupler.