I don't feel too guilty about posting this off topic as i am desparate to get the old Setanta working again. Having relocated into the sticks of Antrim, in an old farm house, my Freeview box is (rather unsurprisingly) not picking anything up. Running around outside and inside with the large metal aerial in hand (it fell off the roof a year or so ago) is not doing much good.
Anybody know much about signal boosters or aerial boosters or anything? The house has SKY TV in the main room but this is unrelated and has it's own dish of course. I want the Freeview box separate in the next room and there are so many signal boosters and such on the market it's hard to know the genuinely useful from the crap.
I'm not an expert in this area but I live "in the sticks" in S.England and bought a new Tv a few months back. I went from having five analogue channels to virtually nothing on Freeview.... called in the local aerial guy, and installed a digital aerial (there are, I believe three grades of digital aerial - I'm loosely calling them standard, better, and even better still!).... I didn't need a booster, though he thought initially I might.
Since then, perfect viewing - apart from the rubbish programs! Suspect a new aerial and a booster will do the trick.... the installer should check the signal strength with the new set up b4 he actually fixes it all in place just to make sure it will bring you some benefit. If you live in a place surrounded by hills and trees then you may have a bigger problem....
What about your neighbours' TV reception...? What set up do they have...??
Hope it all works out! After all, you don't want to miss Naz repeats on Nuts TV!
I did realise after I hit send that you might be some distance away from neighbours! Just FYI the price the guy quoted me for a booster was £60....so I'm guessing these things are quite cheap given that he was probably adding in a margin.
Just by coincidence I read a letter in today's Boxing News about Setanta's Freeview service as it related to the big fights from the States. Apparently on Freeview Setanta have to apply for permission to broadcast after 3am and are only able to do so fora limited number of events per year.
The guy who wrote the letter was - naturally enough! - enraged that his viewing of Margarito-Cotto "died" at 3am.... it seems that via satellite there is no such restriction. I don't have Setanta (yet) myself so don't know for sure if the above is 100%
Steve, email me your Postcode and I'll get the details you need, Used to fit ariels and CCTV etc years ago but one of the mates still runs his own company doing it, so I'll get details of the required ariel type booster etc for you. In fact i think I still have some boosters etc in the boot of the car.
Yeah there is a difference between the old analogue aerial and the newer 'digital' aerial (although there is no such thing as a digital aerial its actually a high gain aerial or wideband aerial) - the new aerials are what they call CAI approved now, which means they are suitable for the new range of channels.
The Triax Unix 52 element or Triax 100 element or the spanish-made Televes DAT 755 & Televes DAT 45 are decent high gains and worth looking into.
Use a high grade of co-ax cable, such as CT100 as this can affect the quality of your precious signal as well.
But sometimes whenever you are boosting your signal, you also boost the unwanted crap that bleeds all over your picture and then in that case maybe use an in-line attenuator (6 or 12db) which simply slots in between the cable and the tv via co-ax connector.
All the above info is great if you know what your doing, but personally i would get a TV aerial engineer with a spectrum analyzer / signal tester to see what he thinks. And i would tell him to bring along some good aerials before he gets to your house too !
