In sons appartment it has been wired for foxtel, in the lounge there is a wall plate with 2 F connectors, they are both FTA tv and foxtel active. i.e. You can connect 2 cables from a foxtel box to the wall plate and you have full foxtel service, or just connect any a FTA TV to either of the wall plate connections and you have normal tv.
When he decided to have foxtel the foxtel box arrived the self installation package show 2 connections at the back of the box to the wall plate and an extra connection for FTA TV.
However as foxtel was aware there was only 2 connectors available, they supplied a Diplexer for the 3rd connection. Oboviously there is some hardware that combines the satelite and FTA antenna's together.
whats the difference between a splitter and a diplexer?
Lets see??? A diplexer is a device that will separate signals by the frequencies that are fed in to the input of the diplexer, example is a diplexer can be used as a combiner that will electronically add the signal from two separate television antennas. One antenna may be say a uhf antenna and is "coupled" into a vhf antenna system. In Melbourne many years ago (35 + years ) SBS used to transmit their signal on channel 0 frequency ( this frequency had been left vacant by channel 0 when they moved and became channel 10 ). SBS and i think it was one of the licence conditions was to move into the UHF band and around in 1984 they did and moved to channel 28. So people that wanted to receive SBS after the change in frequency had a grainy picture due to a number of reasons and one was the customer only had a VHF only antenna. The customer had two options, replace the original antenna with a combination antenna OR add a second antenna ( uhf ) and Diplex the two signals, so as the VHF and the UHF signals travel down the one coax cable. As well as the new UHF antenna most homes also needed to have the old cable ( the old twin feed wire, 300 Ohms wire ) or in some cases the original coax cable was also replaced along with a better quality cable and splitter, wall outlets and even the fly leads. This was also one of the reasons why people were having problems with digital television.
So in a nutshell a diplexer can add two signals OR separate the signals by their respective frequency.
As for a splitter these are mainly used to split ( divide ) the incoming signal. The basic two way splitter will take a signal and split the signal with 50% going to each output terminal, so to look at a splitter another way, if you were to have say 1 volt at the input to your splitter, you would have .5 volts on each of the output terminals. This is where the decibel scale come into play and in this case we would be talking around 3 dB loss. So from the input to the output one would expect a 3dB insertion loss.
If you had say a 4 way splitter and with the same 1 volt input to the splitter each of the 4 outputs of the splitter would have .25 volt on each of the outputs. This would be represented as a 6 dB loss in this case.
Splitters can come in many forms and it is common for the splitter to be found with any thing up to 16 way outlets for a common input
-- Edited by valiant81 on Wednesday 15th of April 2020 12:35:32 PM
The reason for the question was could one do a similar thing with the caravan combine the feed from the Tv antenna with the 2 cables from the satelite dish and then through a diplexer distribute satelite to foxtel and vast, and the FTA to the 3x TV outlets, Vast, Foxtel.
Hi gundog; When ever i had to mix foxtel and free to air in a caravan or mobile home i basically leave the caravan's antenna system alone. Most have one or two points , but some are also capable of taking a feed from a matv system in a caravan park, this is why some caravans have a tv outlet plate on the drivers side of the caravan. For this reason when i have had to install cabling for foxtel or the Vast service i have run up to 4 cables from the decoders, foxtel and vast to the outside of the caravan, running the cables through the caravan is the hard part and every caravan is different ( i usually use the boot or storage are for this )and the same for the feeds from the dish, 2 cables go to the foxtel and the other one goes to the vast receiver. while the 4th cable could be a spair or used with a second decoder for vast. This way when setting up camp it does not matter what cable from the dish is plugged into the outlets that i have installed the system will work !. The best thing about doing the install this way is there is no switching involved and it is real simple for the owner /customer to do the set up, providing they have the the knowledge in being able to set up a dish in the first place .
