TivoHD with Dual Tuner Cards and FIOS....

[JpHudy]

I am switching from DirectTV Tivo boxes to Verizon FIOS with an TivoHD. With the DirectTV Tivo on Satellite, I need to coax connections to record two shows.

Will this be the case with a TivoHD box using an M-Card and FIOS? OR, will I be able to have dual tuner functionality with only one coax connection? I'm assuming one coax line will do it.

Thanks dawgs!

[bkdtv]

Only one coax connection is needed for dual-tuner functionality. The coax is split inside the TivoHD.

[mattack]

There is one coax input for each type of input - cable & antenna. It has an internal splitter.

The reason you needed two connections on a satellite is because of the weird polarity thing they do to increase the bandwidth.

[wkearney99]

Originally Posted by mattack

The reason you needed two connections on a satellite is because of the weird polarity thing they do to increase the bandwidth.

Not exactly the right definition, nor is it 'weird'. They use signaling on the lines going back up TO the dish (or nearby multi-switch) to control which signal is sent back down to the receiver. It's possible for a dish to have more than two LNBs, thus the need to tell it which of the signals to send. I guess you COULD call that "bandwidth" but that's not really accurate.

I switched from DirecTV to FIOS. You only need one coax line going to the Tivo. I don't know that you can re-use the DirecTV cabling. You'd certainly need to remove any existing DirecTV multi-switches first (they look like a big splitter).

And we're not your "dawgs".

[mr.unnatural]

If your cable is RG6 then you can use the existing cabling for FIOS. If it's RG59 then you'll need to upgrade it to RG6. Chances are that RG6 was installed for DirecTV because RG59 has lower bandwidth capabilities.

DirecTV required separate cables for each tuner. When you change channels, the receiver sends a signal up the coax to the dish to tell it which transponder to select. The newer dishes have up to five LNBs so there are both voltage and 22kHz switching signals being transmitted to the LNBs to make sure the proper transponder is selected. Since each tuner in your DVR can be tuned to completely different transponders you need a dedicated line for each tuner. Otherwise, both tuners would be switched to the same transponder, resulting in possible loss of signal on one of the tuners. The 2nd tuner would think it's switched to a channel on a specific transponder when in fact it would be receiving signals from a completely different one. This is the reason why you can't simply split one of the lines coming from a dish to add more receivers.