Satellite dish mounted on our permanent dock? experts?

[Bigbartguy]

hi folks

our trees have grown too tall and block our satellite signal during the warm months. Our lot is boxed in my very tall trees and the only option is mounting on our permanent dock. It would take about 120 ft of coax to reach.

I would guess that I would need to install some kinda pre-amp because of the 120 ft distance. Does this sound correct?

Can I put the preamp near the house (rather not try running electric down to the dock)?

any recommeded preamps? Every preamp I've seen says it's for UHF/VHF and doesnt mention satellite. Do they make these?

Incidentally, the digital switch left us out in cold for broadcast tv. While we could get 3 iffy channels before, with digital switch we get 0 broadcast channels from our roof-mounted UHF/VHF antenna.

thanks for any help!

[The_Duckslayer]

What I would do is run RG11 from the dock to the house. Then you just need an RG6 pigtail at each end should you not be able to directly terminate the RG11 to your equipment. Then you should be able to get buy without an amp at all. That is what we used to do for one of the big box electronic stores to get the satty signal from the roof to the comm room. Many runs were longer than 120 feet. Take care and N Joy the Hunt././Jimbo

[Bigbartguy]

thanks Jimbo!

[Jim Almquist]

At that distance you could get by RG6. We installed a home theater for a guy that had the same problem and we had over 200'of cable running through the woods and had no problems. I would be more concerned that your dish is going to move when the lake freezes over and you will have to adjust it and move it back in the spring or would you mount 2 dish's - one for summer and one for winter ?

[Bigbartguy]

the dish on the house will still be there. If the dock dish stopped working in the winter, I'd just switch to the roof top dish since the leaves will be gone.

[PierBridge]

I've run RG6 over a 100 feet on more than one occasion without problems. You could go RG11 to be safe.

[broken_line]

here i thought this was a redneck thread haha jkjkjk...

[LakeDocktor]

Your signal will be just fine at 120 feet. Dish Network's standards are 200ft, but I have installed systems before that were closer to 300 ft without much signal loss. You cannot hook up a preamp to your system to increase your satellite signal and it will cause more problems than it will help. It will not allow for the higher frequencies to pass through that are required by the satellite transmission. RG6 will work just fine as well. RG11 is rather spendy and sometimes difficult to find. Make sure that you have a continuous run of RG6 without splices to eliminate extra signal loss. Each connection will drop .5 decibels for the fitting, barrel and the other fitting, for a total of 1.5 decibels lost at each connection. For shorter runs, these won't have much of an affect on your signal but longer runs, signal drop is crucial already. Where is your place at?