Satellite dish & DTT Aerial installation

Wheeker

So I'm finally ditching UPC & getting a Satellite dish & DTT Aerial installed on Saturday. Going with Freesat & Saorview into my Media Center PC. I just wanted to double-check a couple of things.

My 1920's house was totally rewired 2 years ago. The sparky ran 5 x TV points from the attic. I checked behind one of the face plates & yup, sure enough, he used RG59 cable . I then got UPC TV/Broadband/Phone installed, I managed to convince the UPC engineer to use the feed from the attic to my living room that the sparky had installed (RG59). He was surprised that it did actually produce a good enough signal for broadband.

Anyhow now I'm getting Satellite/DTT installed & I have read all the threads on RG59 v RG6 v CT100 v WF100 etc. So basically everyone seems to say RG59 is useless. Is it useless even for DTT? I'm keeping the UPC broadband, should I upgrade this cable or indeed should I get ALL my RG59 replaced? Also, I saw the below:

Hissing Sideban wrote: »

I had to replace the cables in my house by gingerly pulling the old cable out ,drawing two pieces of nylon string through, in the process, and then drag a new CT100 / RG 6 run through one at atime, leaving a draw string in place. Without doing this, the pictures were awful, since the braid on most RG59 is not dense enough to stop some pickup directly through the shield.

As it's an old house, the wiring isn't plastered in & is all run under floorboards I was hoping the installer would be able to do the above to at least run CT100 cable for the satellite to the same point as the current RG59. However I mentioned this on the phone & he said he could just put a stacker/destacker on each point. I said surely you can't do that with RG59 & he said "any modern double-shielded cable should be fine". Is he wrong?

Finally, I'm lucky in that the rear of my house is SE facing, however there is a large tree in the garden. It doesn't get heavy foliage in the summer, but would this tree still be a problem in picking-up the Freesat satellite?

Any advice would be appreciated

watty

The main issue is the Screening.

How good is braid? (you should not be able to see through it)

Is there a foil?

The elevation of Sky/Freesat is about 22.5 Degrees.

so for every 1m of tree height above the dish, you need to be about 2.5m away

Fold a square and and that is 45 degrees. Fold the diagonal to halve the 45 degrees and you have 22.5. Sight along that from Dish location with one long edge horizontal to see have you clear view.

The dish is pointing upwards about 15 to 20 degrees more that it seems because it's an offset cut out of a paraboloid.

Wheeker

Thanks for the reply Watty. Had a look last night: it's got RG59 on the outer, the braid is copper & you can see through the gaps in the "lattice". There is no foil. So I presume it's low quality cable


I think I'll just ask the installer if he can:

• Replace as much as possible of the RG59 with CT100 or equivalent for use with the DTT aerial.
• Totally replace the RG59 currently used for the UPC broadband (if possible)
• Only use 4 x new runs of CT100 from satellite dish quad LNB (i.e. forget about the stacker/destacker solution)
• Advise me as to where he can site the dish in relation to the tree

Thanks again

watty

TX100 or PF100. CT100 is a sort of generic term now and the "Good" makers do better cable.

Important that bends are not too tight, and no kinks.