The short version: if you get this type of service, you should carefully check over all the work the installer does before they leave, because they aren’t going to do a very good job otherwise.
The installer came on Wednesday when I was out of town. So far, we’re both very satisfied with the end result — lots of channels at much higher quality than our local cable provider, Comcast. If we had switched to digital cable with comcast with its associated extra fees, only certain channels would have come through in digital. The ones we had the worst trouble with, such as WB and SciFi, would have still been analog.
Their “professional installation,” however, is neither. Keep in mind as you read this that I am neither a hardware person nor handy with tools, I am a software guy. Andrea told me the installer would have to have drilled through a support beam to get the cable run to the wall jack location. He didn’t have the tools with him to do that kind of job anyway, but rather than risk him drilling our house to pieces, she just had him run the cable through the hallway so we could talk about how to do it right.
She and Elizabeth are out of town for a few days visiting Andrea’s grandma, so after my morning bicycle ride I figured I’d see if I could finish up this installation job.
The attic area was pretty interesting. He had moved some insulation aside and even left an un-terminated length of RG6 cable there for me to use in the attic run. Perfect! Our new DirecTivo takes input from two satellites, so we can record two shows at the same time, but it also requires two cables. He used the existing RG6 run by the guy who built our house, plus the extra cable through the hallway. My goal was to run the second cable next to the first one without having to deal with their customer service.
Try as I might, I couldn’t budge the original RG6 from either the TV room or the attic side; it runs between two support beams, bending one of the beams slightly out. Obviously the cables were run before the walls were up, and some builder just attached another beam to the first one, trapping that cable. There also wasn’t enough room to run a cable fish next to the original cable. I decided to take some measurements to see if I could just add a new jack somewhere above the existing one. It took me about five minutes with a tape measure and a laser level to realize that I could easily do just that.
A quick trip to home depot gave me an open-backed junction box, a face plate, some coax ends, and a “keyhole saw”, which is apparently the tool you use to cut through drywall. Once I started that part of the operation, cutting the hole and putting all the pieces together took only a few minutes. The hardest part was crimping the connectors on to the new RG6. Luckily Scott came over and did that part for me; I almost always destroy a few ends whenever I try to make cables, but he got them right on the first try.
There’s a little box called a “multiswitch” that takes the inputs from the two satellites and switches them out to each receiver as needed. They’re handily designed with screw holes on either end, so you can mount them to something. The thoughtful and thorough DirectTV installer chose to leave it hanging from all its connected cables instead. I drilled some holes and hung it from one of the rafters in the attic, re-inserted the ground wires that had come loose during all the drilling and screwing, replaced the insulation on the attic side of the TV room wall, and went back out to watch some TV.
Phew!