Over in our Signal Connect division, we can’t stop talking about the new DIRECTV H26K Commercial Receiver. It’s the most exciting thing to happen to DIRECTV’s business customers in close to a decade. The H26K is small, efficient, and outputs 4K programs. It’s compatible with the same matrix switches that work with DIRECTV’s older receivers as well as the DIRECTV app for business. Best of all, it’s brand new so that customers with aging, decade-old equipment can feel confident upgrading.
But do you need a SWM multiswitch?
It seems like a strange question. The answer is YES, the H26K can only be used with DIRECTV’s SWM technology. But in order to understand the question, we need to kind of look back a little bit and understand why someone would ask it at all.
DIRECTV started using SWM technology in all of its receiver back in the late 2000s. Back then, a lot of people were getting into satellite TV for the first time and adding DVRs. The way the system worked at the time, you needed between four and seven lines coming into the house, and each DVR needed two lines run all the way back to the dish (or to a closet close to the dish.) That’s a lot of cable and a lot of holes in the walls.
DIRECTV’s answer was Single Wire Multiswitch technology. With this technology, most residential customers get one wire into the house which can be split as needed. This cuts down on holes in the wall and on installation time and cost.
Commercial customers and SWM
Commercial customers were slow to adopt SWM technology for several reasons. Because they often used their own installers, they weren’t as sensitive to the number of holes in the wall. Because most commercial customers can’t use DVRs anyway, they only needed one wire per receiver. And, because many commercial installs have all the receivers in the same closet the issue of long cable runs wasn’t really there.
Even today, the standard commercial DIRECTV installation has you run seven wires into the house and use an external SWM multiswitch rather than using one built into the dish. This is a more flexible and scalable arrangement.
The bottom line is that some commercial installations still don’t use SWM technology, and that means there’s a challenge in using the new H26K.
Marine and RV customers and SWM
Most marine and RV satellite antennas don’t support DIRECTV’s SWM system. DIRECTV SWM is completely proprietary and the specs aren’t shared with other manufacturers. This means that it’s hard for companies like Winegard, KING, and Intellian to add this tech. They have to buy the SWM hardware straight from DIRECTV and that adds to cost.
So again, a lot of marine and RV equipment requires non-SWM-capable receivers to work, and this means an uphill battle in putting in those H26K receivers.
IT CAN BE DONE!
You don’t need to feel like you’re totally locked out of the H26K revolution because your current installation doesn’t support SWM. You can add an external DIRECTV SWM multiswitch to an existing non-SWM system. As long as you can run two lines to the SWM, it’s going to work. In order to get HD and 4K however, you will need to run all six lines.
Adding a SWM multiswitch doesn’t mean that you need to change your entire install. If your receivers were made after 2006 you can use them with DIRECTV SWM technology. If you’d rather not rewire everything, you can split off the lines you need. You may need these splitters to do it, depending on how many lines you have available. It’s also best to hire a commercial installer to do things right.
If you’d like to know more about adapting your existing DIRECTV Commercial setup to use DIRECTV SWM technology, call the experts! The folks at Signal Connect have over 20 years of experience helping commercial customers on land, sea, and on the road. No one has done more marine and mobile activations than we have, and all of our commercial customers like the personal touch we bring to our customer service!
Call 888-233-7563 during East Coast business hours and you’ll talk to an expert who can help you move forward with your commercial DIRECTV install. If it’s after hours, fill out the form below! We’ll get right back to you.
