I have DirecTV!

Welcome back, and thanks for keeping tabs on what I'm doing! I hope that I've inspired you to do the same.

Well, so the DirecTV installer showed up on Friday and installed two rooms for High Definition DVR. I have a pre-wired house, with centralized wire closet, so my wife and I pulled 2 runs of dual RG6 cable last weekend in anticipation of this install. The cable was an awesome deal – I got it from CablesForLess - 500 feet on a REAL spool for $99 (it was a closeout).

I had also purchased a 75′ HDMI cable from them so that I could place the tuner in the closet, and run the cable to the TV through the attic. Alas, it was not to be. I don’t think an OompaLoompa could crawl through my attic!

So, the install went very smoothly. The installer mounted the dish on my block wall with a clear view of the Southern sky, then trenched the cable under the rocks in my yard, and up into my distribution panel for cable. From there, he just connected to the dual runs we had pulled, and connected them again in our distribution box out to the two rooms (each room in our house has dual F connections in the wall; the living room has four). Voila! Directv in both rooms.

No automation yet – I’m still waiting for the GC-100 to arrive. Once that gets here, I’ll use it to control the A/V stack in the living room via my iPhone.

Until then, I have two HR21-100 DVR’s to explore.