Friends, right up front I’m going to apologize for the clickbaity headline. But, I needed to get the attention of a certain kind of person. This article will hopefully explain why.
The problem
The problem is that with DIRECTV’s most common system, you are limited to cable runs of about 150 feet. There’s a little more to it than that, but the point is that if you need a run from one end of your mansion to the other, it’s going to be hard to do and there will be some limitations. The biggest is that you can’t share programming or use Genie clients at those long distances.
The culprit here is the SWM technology that’s used in modern DIRECTV systems. Like other modern systems, it’s two-way. Most of the signals come from the Genie server, but the clients send back information like button presses and status reports. It’s possible to amplify the signal from the server, but there is no commercial amplifier that will amplify what’s called “the return path.”
That’s far from the only issue. As cable lengths increase, so does latency. Although many readers have pointed out that latency, the time it takes for the signal to travel through the cable, shouldn’t be a problem, it is. I can’t explain it either but it’s clearly a part of the system. As cable runs increase, there is a noticeable slowdown in performance and the official line is that latency is the culprit.
Can you make your own bidirectional amplifier?
There are amplifiers out there that work bidirectionally. They are used in cable TV headends, for example. And really the frequencies you need to amplify are really low — about 2.3MHz — so it shouldn’t be too hard to create something that would work.
Except, you can’t. Or at least I can’t, and I’ve tried.
It should be noted that the DIRECTV multiswitch expects a fairly weak signal and overamplifying it seems to fry the multiswitch. Folks, this is the voice of experience here. It’s not worth blowing up a $200 multiswitch trying this stuff.
Adding that amplification also doesn’t deal with the latency issue, and in fact seems to make it worse. In my experiments, I used a 10dB CATV amplifier and I was able to get to the point where the whole thing worked with a 500′ cable run. Well, sort of. It worked but it was a terrible experience. It took 10 seconds for a button press to register, which made fast-forwarding impossible. And that’s a key feature of the Genie system.
So in the end…
In the end this is not a solution for long cable runs in DIRECTV systems. There still isn’t a really great solution there. You can add a second dish and use an HR54 Genie DVR so that you can supplement with H24 receivers. Or you can start a second account, so that you have two different systems. You can use a phone or tablet running the DIRECTV app and cast to a TV that’s far away. In most cases you can even get content from your DVR that way. But it’s not a terribly good experience compared to the way most of us watch TV. There are options, as you see, but adding an amplifier isn’t one of them.
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What are you trying to amplify? You mention the 2.3 MHz SWM control signal but that’s not the problem. It is output at 0 dbm and RG6 loses less than 0.5 db per 100 ft at that frequency. So long as the amplifier is passive at that frequency (which all satellite and cable amplifiers are) you aren’t losing the SWM control signal.
Amplifying the SWM channels from 950-2150 MHz is also simple, it is unidirectional and there are plenty of amplifiers sold on your site that can handle that and they can be line powered if you need one or more in the span instead of just on the ends.
So I assume even though you don’t mention it explicitly you’re talking about the DECA signals from 475-625 MHz that pass in both directions as the issue. There’s a simple way around that, just use a DECA on both ends of the connection to pull the DECA signal off the cable for the long run. Then you only have to worry about amplifying the 950-2150 MHz range which is straightforward to accomplish. The problem is what you do with that DECA signal when the DECAs have converted it to twisted pair.
For short runs (less than 100 meters) you can simply connect the two DECAs together with a cat5 crossover cable and you’re good. For longer runs you’d need another way to cross the distance – either switch(es) in the path, wifi, or extended “ethernet” solutions that can hit nearly a kilometer over cat6 or (a separate) coax.
The talk of latency from cable length makes no sense. RF signals travel through coax as electricity at a good portion of the speed of light. Even a cable thousands of feet long adds only a microsecond or two of latency. The “latency” being induced is due to transmission errors – if the DECA path is noisy/lossy then packets for e.g. button presses are getting lost, timing out, and having to be retransmitted multiple times before they get through. Pulling the DECA signal off the cable and transmitting it in a more reliable way (so yeah, probably don’t try to cover a 1000 ft gap using wifi unless you really know what you’re doing) will address that “latency” issue.
slice1900’s comments make a lot of sense to me. Additionally, If you are using a mini-client, there is NO RF on the cable run except the bi-directional IP packets on the DECA (MOCA) link. The signals between the Genie server (or other STB) -and the SWM at 2.3 MHz only travel between those two devices. (With a SWM LNB the SWM switch is in the LNB housing). Everything on the SWM channels from 950 to 2150 Mhz is unidirectional from the SWM to the Genie or HRxx box..