Settle a disagreement.

I'm working with a 2012 Heartland Bighorn. I'm patching in a Dish Tailgater system to the internal cabling on the Bighorn. My friend insists that the satellite signal runs simultaneously to the bedroom AND the living room and that only 1 converter is required to get programming on both sets. I say that the living room and the bedroom sets will each require a converter. Who is correct?

Hi Dblboinger,

Welcome to the Heartland Owners Forum.

The Bighorn internal satellite coax has separate lines going to the bedroom and to the living room. As with a residence, Dish would expect a receiver to be placed in each location. Recent Dish Tailgater's may support 2 receivers, but I'm not sure the older units did.

In the Universal Docking Center (UDC), you'll find 4 coax connectors in a row, above the water connections. They are paired. 1/2 of each pair goes to the roof to support installation of a Winegard Trav'ler. The other 1/2 of each pair goes to either bedroom or living room.

Some people have managed to get satellite in both locations from a single receiver, if the receiver has coax output. The output can be split so one leg goes to the living room TV and the other leg gets plugged into the coax connector that carries the Cable/Antenna signal.

Another method is to use a wireless transmitter/receiver pair to supply a signal to the 2nd TV. Assuming a remote control with RF rather than IR, the Dish channel could be selected from the room away from the receiver.

I have a 2011 Bighorn I use 2 receivers for my Directv. One in LR and the other in the BR. I use a tripod not roof mounted. But must connect in the UDC either way




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Dblboinger said:

I'm working with a 2012 Heartland Bighorn. I'm patching in a Dish Tailgater system to the internal cabling on the Bighorn. My friend insists that the satellite signal runs simultaneously to the bedroom AND the living room and that only 1 converter is required to get programming on both sets. I say that the living room and the bedroom sets will each require a converter. Who is correct?

Click to expand...

My Dish Tailgater would could only support one TV, per the manual. Newer units may support more. Mine was 2013.

If your dish receiver has RCA jacks in the back, you can get a RCA to coax converter to back feed the signal into the coax connector that carries the Cable/Antenna signal.

One model of the newer tailgaters will support two receivers as in comes with two coax connector, but you have to route the cabling as Dan already described. I did in fact cable my single receiver to support both TV using diplexers (these are directional) and cabling it to the bedroom. To me it was not worth the effort because the bedroom would only receive the programming the living room was displaying and basically could only control the volume and most of our viewing is in the living room. I usually set the bedroom up using OTA so I can catch the local weather and news in the mornings/evenings.

Maybe this is off thread, but I thought I would put it out there. I don't use an automatic aiming antenna, I use a home dish on a tripod. I have a Dish VIP 722 DUAL TUNER receiver (I think I did hear that Dish is discontinuing these, but you can get them on E-Bay). I can watch 2 different channels of programming on my living room and bedroom TV's. The coax in from the dish is a single line. What I find most interesting as a retired electronic technician is the fact that the extremely high frequency signal from the dish comes from the UDC rearwards down the in wall coax to the receiver in the living room, while the UHF signal TO the bedroom TV from the receiver goes frontwards up THE SAME COAX CABLE AT THE SAME TIME using frequency band splitters (diplexers).