We went and looked at a potential takeover today. Customer now has (installed within the last six months) DirecTV system on SWM. The cabling in the house is a bit crazy but it goes something like this.

1 RG6 from the Dish to a 4 port SWM splitter. Three of the outputs run to boxes in the house, the fourth runs to another four port SWM splitter (about 30' away). That one has four lines connected, I did not have time to see what they all ran to.

There are currently six boxes in the house, all working fine.

My question is this.... How many boxes can run on an SWM system? (used to be eight, not sure if that is more now) Can more swm splitters be cascaded?

The customer wants to add four to five more TV's. We're trying to figure out what to use for TV sources on them. Obviously, DirtecTV makes the most sense, just not sure if this can be expanded.

the best way to run more than 8 tuners on a dtv system is to run 4 lines from the dish to the head end, install a SWM16 and then install two split8's. This will give you 16 available tuners.

SWM LNB can accomodate 8 tuners.
That could be 8 single tuner boxes, 4 dual tuner boxes, 4 single tuner 2 dual tuner boxes, etc...
The number of splitters and/or ports on the splitters doesn't really matter, beyond the fact you have to watch your losses. Meaning: If you had an 8way splitter, with a port feeding another 8way splitter, with a port feeding another 8way splitter - a receiver on that last splitter probably isn't going to work (or at least give you errors) due to signal loss.

To have more than 8 tuners, you have to swap the LNB to a conventional LNB, run 4 coax to a SWM multiswitch. A SWM16 has 2 outputs, each can do 8 tuners. A SWM32 has 4 outputs, each doing 8 tuners. Etc...

being that you have 6 tuners in action now, and you need 4 or 5 more, than you need to upgrade.
Being that you have 1 line from the dish now, you will need to run 3 additional lines so that you have four total.
Now add the SWM16 and two split8's.
Now you can have upto 16 tuners and accomidate the clients needs.

You can also refer the client to DTV and they will generally perform the upgrade for much less than you can even purchase the equipment for.

Thanks for the info. DirecTV will definitely be doing the upgrades, I'm not messing with it. I just wanted to know the extent the system would need to be upgraded to accommodate the new TV's. (new lines to the dish etc, where switches would be, etc.)

The wiring in this place is nutty, so we may need to go to cable or a matrix.

Note for future writers of such threads: SWM makes us think differently, in terms of tuners instead of boxes, so the first thing that you'll need to know is just what boxes you have, not how many boxes you have.

We figure out what you can do from knowing how many tuners each box has and adding them up.