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This Is Bound to End in Tears
Jan. 26th, 2011 09:14 pmWe have DirecTV. We recently bought two new high-def sets to replace the old-fashoned ones in our bedroom and the office. This meant replacing the old sets' receivers with HD receivers and hooking them up to the separate HD dish.
We have three receivers that share the single HD dish. But for technical reasons, you can't use a plain old signal splitter with a DirecTV receiver. Instead, a device called a multiswitch takes all five inputs from the dish and lets each receiver attached to the switch decide which input it wants to use.
The multiswitch on our building's roof has eight outputs. With the new HD sets, we use four for our apartment, and the other apartments downstairs in the same building use at least two of the remainder and maybe all four of them.
This is a problem. See, our building is in a row of similar buildings that are the same height and share a common roof. So residents of at least one apartment in a neighboring building don't have a dish on their building's roof. Instead, their installer got lazy and ran a line to ours.
This may have worked before, but our installer probably disconnected them when hooking up our new receivers. They, in turn, seem to have disconnected our bedroom's receiver to get their service back, which I discovered this morning when I went onto the roof to find out why we no longer had a signal, figuring that it was crucial to take care of this before this latest chapter of snowmageddon. Naturally, I unplugged them and plugged our own receiver back in.
Now, what the neighbors ought to do is to get their own building set up properly. Failing that, it's possible to cascade multiswitches so that more and more receivers can share a single dish. But I suspect that they're simply going to go back up on the roof and undo what I just did, and that this is going to turn into a Thing.
We have three receivers that share the single HD dish. But for technical reasons, you can't use a plain old signal splitter with a DirecTV receiver. Instead, a device called a multiswitch takes all five inputs from the dish and lets each receiver attached to the switch decide which input it wants to use.
The multiswitch on our building's roof has eight outputs. With the new HD sets, we use four for our apartment, and the other apartments downstairs in the same building use at least two of the remainder and maybe all four of them.
This is a problem. See, our building is in a row of similar buildings that are the same height and share a common roof. So residents of at least one apartment in a neighboring building don't have a dish on their building's roof. Instead, their installer got lazy and ran a line to ours.
This may have worked before, but our installer probably disconnected them when hooking up our new receivers. They, in turn, seem to have disconnected our bedroom's receiver to get their service back, which I discovered this morning when I went onto the roof to find out why we no longer had a signal, figuring that it was crucial to take care of this before this latest chapter of snowmageddon. Naturally, I unplugged them and plugged our own receiver back in.
Now, what the neighbors ought to do is to get their own building set up properly. Failing that, it's possible to cascade multiswitches so that more and more receivers can share a single dish. But I suspect that they're simply going to go back up on the roof and undo what I just did, and that this is going to turn into a Thing.
