My regional Sat-CATV head-end

[archive10]

Here's quick pic of my distribution switch and associated cabling (right-hand panel).
The distribution switch is for 28.2E and cable TV.

I (of course) have other sat's coming in on other cables, some of which are seen on the right-hand panel, together with a CATV data filter and some splitters.
As and when time permits, cable tidying will be applied, but I delay this until I have the stable sat-config set-up in a few weeks.

So ... what does your distribution end look like?
Answers on other thread in this section!


View attachment 85326

 

[Analoguesat]

Mine is just a dreadful tangle of wires down the back of the telly - and no Im most certainly not posting a picture!

At some pont (when the current tv goes wrong probably) the whole lot will be redone from scratch,

 

[smoggy07]

Mine is just a dreadful tangle of wires down the back of the telly - and no Im most certainly not posting a picture!

At some pont (when the current tv goes wrong probably) the whole lot will be redone from scratch,

Snap, Snap and Snap with the addition of a few random cables ran loosely round the skirting boards

SWMBO keeps nagging on for me to sort them out but I don't have a full day to waste doing it, besides every time I sort them out and get it looking like the picture in the first post, the "Cable Gremlins" come out to play and it ends up looking twice as bad as this pic: Project 365 #318: 141109 Spaghetti Junction!

 

[lovelyperson]

Here's quick pic of my distribution switch and associated cabling (right-hand panel).

That is impressive and interesting.....Congrats.

 

[Analoguesat]

SWMBO keeps nagging on for me to sort them out but I don't have a full day to waste doing it, besides every time I sort them out and get it looking like the picture in the first post, the "Cable Gremlins" come out to play and it ends up looking twice as bad as this pic: Project 365 #318: 141109 Spaghetti Junction!

Yeah thats like the back of the telly - but with lots of dustbunnies added. Last time we decorated it took me a weekend to get the cabling more or less correctly connected!

 

[A nonymous]

Its a work in progress is what i always say. My Multiswitch failed a few months ago so after changing the Quattro lnb for a quad my headend is currently just an tangle of cables barreled together so i can get a feed to each room.

The only room that now has a Terrestrial feed is the living room which is diplexed into the sat cable.


I will get round to sorting it out eventually

 

[timo_w2s]

I've just acquired a multiswitch in our new home, going to take a closer look at it at the weekend to see how it is set up but it's just 28E, terrestrial and DAB with 8 outputs I believe. Never had one of these before.

 

[archive10]

Update: What it looks like now.

The nice technicians from the CATV company came by earlier this year, searching for sources of irradiation of noise on the cable feed.
I had a phone-call from my wife saying "these people want to change something in your wiring...".

The essence is that they were looking for bad connectors and bad filters that could be the source of RF irradiation on the cable-TV line, that made life difficult for some of our neighbours. Upon inspection of the installation (as in post #1 above), they deemed the CATV/DOCSIS splitter was in need of replacement, and all connectors was changed (no screw-on F-connectors on the splitter).

As I was at work, I gave them the OK the change what the felt was necessary to make the neighbours happy again. The result was a working installation, but with some free-hanging cables (as I requested them not to affix any devices to the chip-boards).

Using this as an excuse to clean up, I changed the installation to use (mostly) compression connectors, and at least double-shielded cabling.
Result can be seen in the attached picture (note the grounding - I ran out of yellow-green wire, and had to resort to whatever was available (brown!)).

 

[Analoguesat]

Ive just moved house and the weekend I dismantled the av equipment I was amazed to find just how many unconnected cables were round the back of the telly! Satellite coax / ethernet / av rca etc What seemed like several miles of coax came out of the garden as well.....

 

[archive10]

Ive just moved house and the weekend I dismantled the av equipment I was amazed to find just how many unconnected cables were round the back of the telly! Satellite coax / ethernet / av rca etc What seemed like several miles of coax came out of the garden as well.....

@Analoguesat: Just to show that some large installations needn't be all tidy and done up to work just fine, here's a few snaps of our sat-routing racks at our main head-end at work.





Pictured are the signal routing from the dishes on the roof before feeding into IRDs or transcoders for further distribution and packaging of live tv contribution.
(These are mostly for foreign channels - at the local broadcasters we are moving to placing encoders at the broadcaster's facilities, so we can have uncompressed input to the encoding process.)

The racks have AFAIK been around since the late 90's, so the "complexity" has had plenty of time to evolve.
I'm sure you will feel relieved at the relative order and structure that the back of your telly surely presented. ;)

 

[Analoguesat]

That looks like the main computer cabinet at work. It was wired 15 years ago, and the idiot that did the job used 5m cables! No-one dares starting to redo it its probably a couple of weeks work to recable it properly. The cab is in a dreadful mess now - theres no way to extract old cables from it as they are all tangled up between & under the switches so when something needs changing a new cable is added....

 

[archive10]

Ok, change of equipment.
Got hold of a really reasonably-priced Goobay 2-in multiswitch (two sats + 1 terrestrtial).
So I changed the EMP-Centauri 5x12 to the Goobay 9x8 multiswitch (to cope with future 28.2 adventures).
Finally mounted it, and at least the cable TV stuff seems to come through ok (even though the Goobay switch does not provide any amplification for the terrestrial signal).



But... I am having problems with the SAT part of the output.
Reception was never worse - I have lost Channel 4 and BBC4HD etc.
As it has been a while since I checked last, I don't know if this is general failure, or due to change of equipment.
But I will find out... more updates as I get more traction with the new unit...