Return Socket question

calum

In which I demonstrate my ignorance of cabling and electricals...

Our Sky box is connected conventionally enough: two inputs to the box from the wall plate, and one RF Output from the box to the Return socket on the wall plate. The Return socket is wired to a patch panel under the stairs, which sends the signal to the antenna sockets in the other rooms in the house. Thus we can plug a TV into any room in the house, and get the picture from the Sky box.

Long story short, we need to move the Sky box to a different room. That room has one of those antenna sockets that's connected to the patch panel. If I plugged the RF Out from the Sky box into that antenna socket, would it just function the same way as the Return socket on our current wall plate? Or is a Return socket connected up differently somehow?

ardle1

calum wrote: »

In which I demonstrate my ignorance of cabling and electricals...

Our Sky box is connected conventionally enough: two inputs to the box from the wall plate, and one RF Output from the box to the Return socket on the wall plate. The Return socket is wired to a patch panel under the stairs, which sends the signal to the antenna sockets in the other rooms in the house. Thus we can plug a TV into any room in the house, and get the picture from the Sky box.

Long story short, we need to move the Sky box to a different room. That room has one of those antenna sockets that's connected to the patch panel. If I plugged the RF Out from the Sky box into that antenna socket, would it just function the same way as the Return socket on our current wall plate? Or is a Return socket connected up differently somehow?

Sounds like you just have one Dish input! and that's going into your wall plate, hence coax coming from wall plate straight into Sky Box... So you must keep same config. Your patch will have no signal to share unless you have dish coax going to box and then RF going to 'patch'.

The Cush

calum wrote: »

Long story short, we need to move the Sky box to a different room. That room has one of those antenna sockets that's connected to the patch panel. If I plugged the RF Out from the Sky box into that antenna socket, would it just function the same way as the Return socket on our current wall plate? Or is a Return socket connected up differently somehow?

The antenna socket in that room should work OK as an RF feed to the distributon panel but the cable at the panel end may have to be swapped over from an output to an input socket depending on the type of setup you have.

What type of patch panel do you have, is it a distribution amplifier of some sort? Can you post a pic?

I assume you have 2 separate feeds from the dish to that room also?

calum

ardle1 wrote: »

Sounds like you just have one Dish input! and that's going into your wall plate, hence coax coming from wall plate straight into Sky Box... So you must keep same config. Your patch will have no signal to share unless you have dish coax going to box and then RF going to 'patch'.

Yes, sorry... meant to say that Sky box will of course also have correct inputs when moved to new location. One of these days I'll learn not to assume people know what I meant :P

calum

The Cush wrote: »

What type of patch panel do you have, is it a distribution amplifier of some sort? Can you post a pic?

I assume you have 2 separate feeds from the dish to that room also?

Picture of patch box attached--I have no idea how it works, it just does If it's a case of (at worst) swapping something over in there that's great, was just concerned about having to run a new cable into it.

Yes, we'll have the correct feeds in the new location... long story short, we currently take the feed from a communal hub that feeds into one room, but that's being decommissioned soon so we'll have to replace it with a dish that'll feed into a different room.

The Cush

One of the cables on the lower patch panel is probably the feed from the RF out on the Sky box and another is the feed to the other room, if you can figure out which is which it should be a matter of swapping them over.

calum

Grand, thanks.