What a coinkidink
Just did the same last night for the kitchen. Being realistic, I could live without sat. or any cable but have to keep the household happy. However, here's the arrangement and using Dish Network with a
single box . So far I'm pleased and have kept the bill minimal.
To begin with, the box we have is a dual tuner HD. Something like a Dish model 222.
The primary where the receiver sits is HD. The sat. remote is
IR only to control both the TV and sat. box.
A secondary room, bedroom and now the kitchen are all piped with RGA 6 cable with a triple coupler. The secondary jack on the back of the receiver is UHF with a small antenna making it signal throughout the home and control the receiver box. (I had to remote elevate that little antenna, by adding a 6 foot RGA-6 cable and hide it to make the remotes in the other rooms work.). The secondary rooms all can operate the box and each TV has its own sat. remote that uses IR programed to each respectively.
All secondary room controllers are both UHF (to control the box only) and IR (to control the TV only).
The key was
acquiring remote controls with the exact signal UHF (as printed on the back of them). A must to make them work. I opened the remotes and found it unable to change the frequency to match. But they are very cheap new on ebay, about $10 incl shipping.
The negative side is all the secondary's will be on the same channel. (The primary is on its own and is HD.) Also, the secondary's are not HD and are standard definition. That's probably due to the box I found and further won't accept an external hard drive.
In our house, thats not a big deal as there's enough other media to the TV's from disc players and a Netgear box for internet content, etc. The other plus with Dish is the free online so while on a network, it's perfect to send any program to that TV, without any additional box... no Solo or Slingbox!
Ebay has all these boxes dirt cheap to buy, so no rental or extra service fees from the sat. provider. All legal and quite neat how all this tech has lowered the monthly bill substantially and paying only for the programing with upgrade HD signal.