[wejones]

As far as the sat signal is concerned, I wouldn't worry until you were close to 300'. I'm running about 225' on one cable, and something near 250' on the other one. And one of my cables is about 175' of RG6 spliced to 50 or 75' of RG59, which is far from ideal, but works fine.
Now I am not "yet" trying to drive a motor off this, so there could be a problem there, but I doubt that it would do more than just slow it down a bit. I'm hoping to try out my new motor for the first time tomorrow, so I'll find out. I put a pole in a possibly temporary hole (used a 10 year old bag of concrete, and it doesn't look like it is going to set up right), and hopefully I can plop the little dish on it tomorrow and try out the motor. Right now I just have the dish mounted on a 3x3 bolted to a log.