RG6 Coax
We purchased the Tailgater and would like to make use of our outside connection for Satellite, rather than running coax through a slide and directly into receiver. How can we determine if the connecti...
Forum Discussion
Bill.Satellite wrote:soundslikefun wrote:Bill.Satellite wrote:
You will find no noticeable difference in signal quality at the satellite receiver with a short run of RG59 or RG6. It's simply not an issue. If you want to run 50+ feet you may see a slight drop in signal (still not likely enough to make a difference). If you want the best quality cable, then use RG6 but if your coach has internal RG59 you can use it without a second thought.
In my 15 years as a custom AV installer I have found problems caused countless times from a customer trying to hook up some of their own equipment and simply replacing a RG 59 cable as short as 6'. Especially when they use low quality premade cables (Radio Shack or Walmart variety). Will it work? Yes, sometimes. Is it just as easy to avoid it altogether to eliminate that possible issue? Absolutely.
In 12 years of selling, installing and setting up satellite TV systems in RV's I have never found good RG59 cabling in an RV to be an issue of any kind. I always installed RG6 on a new roof mounted installation (unless the manufacturer provided a satellite pre-wire) but many installations are portables and the user wants to use the existing cable connection (or separate external satellite connection). In this case, I have never found the existing cabling to be an issue and long as you verified the continuity of the cabling and provided very good connections at each end.
Even Dish Network says that when setting up their Hopper and Joey systems the runs from the Solo Node through their splitter and up to 3 Joey's can all be done with RG59 coax.
If we actually take a look at some facts, it's pretty easy to see that the performance of RG59 really isn't so bad in the 1.5-2.0 GHz range that is needed to get the signal from the LNB to the receiver. This calculator permits you to compute the line loss as a function of frequency for any length of coax: Coax loss calculator I think part of the confusion may result from some people thinking that the coax has to transmit the Ku and Ka band signals to the receiver. It doesn't; the LNB downconverts those to the 1.5-2.0 GHz range.
Forty feet (one motorhome length) of RG59/U produces a 4.67dB loss compared with the 3.74dB loss in the same length of RG6/U. For most installations that's not going to make the difference between success and failure. In my experience the weak link is usually cheap connectors, poorly attached, rather than the cable itself.
