Wiring Question

I'm about to make the jump to HD . . . cant wait . . .

One piece of functionality I think I'll lose is :

Right now our wiring goes into the standard definition receiver from the dish then out but not to the TV but to the cable wiring that circulates around the house - we have two receivers this way, one on channel 3, the other on channel 4, so we can watch either receiver on any of the satellite (cable) outputs from the wall.

From looking at the HD receiver it looks like the out from the receiver has three cables hooking into the TV so I think I have to have a receiver for each TV hooked directly in as opposed to being able to send the signal throughout the house.

That's right. The HD receivers only "service" one TV at a time. Coax cable is not an HD connection. You need Component or HDMI to get HD signals, unless of course your TV has a built in HD tuner and you are getting OTA HD. If you have other SD TV's in the house, you will need another receiver to provide the satellite signal to those TV's.

Depending on the HD receiver you wind up with, it may be possible to duplicate your setup by getting a couple of RF modulators. You then connect the modulator input to the A/V output of your HD receiver, the red-white-yellow connections. The RF output will connect just like your current receivers. You can set one modulator to channel 3 and the other to channel 4 just like you have done with the receivers.

The modulators are available at Walmart or Radio Shack as well as on line stores like amazon for under $30.

Now if you wind up with a HD TiVo or H20 or HR20 receiver there is a problem with those particular receivers. In order to get any video out of the A/V jacks the receiver must be set for 480i output format. That would mean in order to watch TV in the remote rooms you would need to switch the receivers out of HD. That may or may not be a problem. Otherwise like was suggested, keep your SD receivers for the other TVs. Of course that will require additional cabling.