A friend of mine asked me to help him figure out a low cost solution for a problem. He wants to be able to shut off his Satellite TV when he leaves, so that his kids can't watch when they are grounded. He has Dish, which doesn't have the ability to do what he wants inside the receiver. He can buy a card swiper for $100 bucks, but isn't sure if it would work the way he wants.

I'm thinking a keyed coax switch would work, but can't find anything like it on the net. IF the kids are smart they could fairly easily splice around it, but if the switch were in a locked box and they didn't know much about how it worked it would probably deter them. I'm sure it wouldn't deter some kids, but these kids are pretty lazy and not very electronics-minded beyond how to operate the clicker.

Any ideas?

(Ideally the switch could be remotely triggered so that the kids wouldn't have any idea how he was turning it on and off, but that's probably dreaming too big.)

-Steve G.