If your home’s satellite dish goes out, can you use the dish from your RV?

Sadly, it happens. Sometimes you’ll lose satellite service at home. This can be due to a tree slowly growing in the path of the dish. It can also be due to something that just, sorta, happens. The dish could get knocked out of alignment. It could be covered in snow without your being able to get to it. There are quite a few reasons why this could happen.

For those folks with satellite service in their RVs, there might be an option while you’re waiting for the fix for your home dish. You can run a line from your RV’s dish to your home system. The key here is figuring out how to do it, and whether or not it’s worth doing.

Planning ahead for this sort of thing

I’ve said before, the best plan for RV satellite is to make sure that your RV system and your home system are identical. This means using the same sort of dish and as much similar equipment as possible. If you’re not sure what you have, your Signal Connect tech can help you figure it out just from photos you send us from your phone.

If the two systems are really the same, it should be a matter of running a cable from the RV, disconnecting the cable from the dish, and connecting the one from the RV. You’ll need two things:

RG6 Cable from Solid SIgnal

Satellite-capable barrel connector

Note that the barrel connector is a bag of 50. You can get them singly but honestly the price isn’t that different when you factor in shipping. The most important thing is that both the cable and connectors are rated for satellite TV. Most of what you find in home stores isn’t rated for frequencies over 1000MHz, and isn’t rated to carry power. You’ll need both of those in order to use satellite TV.

It should be as easy as disconnecting a cable from a receiver and bringing it into the house. Then disconnect the line from the house’s dish to the first splitter and connect the cable from the receiver. YOu might need to keep the power on in the RV. If that doesn’t work, the two systems might not be as similar as you thought. No worries, though. All you have to do at that point is call us and we’ll help you through the process.

And this is legal and all?

There’s nothing illegal about using a different dish. In fact you can also use this same technique to share a dish with a neighbor, as long as you use a band stop filter to make sure your receivers can’t see theirs. That filter goes before any cable going into your house. Apartment complexes and hotels use a single dish, sometimes for hundreds of customers. Nothing wrong with it as long as you’re doing it right.

Get expert advice

This all sounds pretty simple, and it usually is. But, if it’s not, don’t worry! You have a friend in the business. Signal Connect handles more RV satellite activations than anyone else in the world. We’ve been doing it for over 20 years and we understand what it takes. If you need tech support or you want to upgrade your system, call us! The number is [email protected]. We’re here for you during East Coast business hours. If you want to reach us after hours, just fill out the form below.