I was a previous DirectTV customer with SD dish on the roof of my two-story house. I now have Comcast, but am planning to go back to DirecTV HD service in Jan 2009. All of my RG-6 drops to the rooms come to a central wiring closet under the inside stairs (on the 1st floor). While my builder thought he was being "proactive" by running two drops to the attic (DSS) and two drops to the street (CATV), they did NOT put in conduit to the wiring closet from the attic or the street, and there's no way to pull more RG-6 to the attic without ripping out walls. It MAY be possible for me to run one RG-6 all the way across the attic and outside and down the wall to the demarc for the CATV and steal one of those inbound coax lines, but I am planning on keeping Comcast for Hi-Speed Internet so I can't steal both. Will a 5-LNB HD Dish work in my home with this situation?

1.) How many runs (minimum) are needed to get HD signals from the dish to the multiswitch in the closet downstairs?

2.) If I can use the third line (from one of the CATV inlets), will the extra distance on that run (across attic & down side of house) screw up the signal quality (if coaxen is not all the same length)?

3.) Is there any solution to get the 5-LNB signal multiplexed onto two wires up in the attic to run it down into the wiring closet on the existing two RG-6 lines and then into another switch in the wiring clsoet on the 1st floor to distribute out to the rooms?

(And finally - how the heck will I ever communicate this to the installer! ;-)

Thanks...

Tom