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TV Aerials and boosters


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I've moved into the cabin in the garden and at the same time fitted the recommended TV aerial. We are 46 miles from the transmitter, so in rain and snow the picture quality is poor or non existent.

 

On another post someone suggested a mast head booster, but are they any good? 

 

I could move the aerial up a very tall tree next to the house, would being heigher up help with reception?

 

Edited by Triassic
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I have a mast head amplifier and it works fine. If you have trees obstructing the signal, especially with wet leaves, the picture will be poor and it's best to site the aerial away from the trees.

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The problem I have s we're surrounded by trees. The aerial points down a gap in the trees but there are trees on both sides of the gap. I was thinking about putting it up s very large tree which may get me about the rest. Other than that its chain saw time, fell a couple and trim the rest.

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Guest Alphonsox

Would a Freesat setup work any better ?

I was forced to abandon the use of aerials at our place in England, absolutely nothing would work consistently due to the river estuary "tuning out" the signal.

 

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You probably already know but.. The golden rules of TV aerials...

 

1).Make sure you have the right type and size of aerial. Bigger is better. A broadband aerial might not be the best choice, depends on the transmitter.

2) Mount it as high as possible.

3) Use a good quality down lead.

3) If done all that then consider a mast head amplifier.

 

Big aerials are usually more directional than smaller aerials so more critical to tweak them until they point in exactly the right direction.

 

"Back of the set boosters" are the devils work. There is no real excuse for them (mast head amp is better). A distribution amplifier is different.

Edited by Temp
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I spent around £300 on a new high gain antenna, 12ft mast, masthead amplifier, low loss double screened cable etc when the digital switch over happened, to try and get terrestrial digital TV.  Some of our neighbours did the same.  None of us succeeded in getting a decent signal, the slightest bit of interference, from a passing car or motorcycle usually, would cause the set to lock up and freeze for ten seconds or more.  It was completely unwatchable, as often the lock ups would be every 30 seconds or less apart.

 

I ended up binning the whole lot and buying a dish and Freesat box.  Best thing I've ever done, as the picture quality is consistently better than Freeview (higher bit rate, I think) and there is never any interference at all.  The dish and 4 way LNB was around £40, from ebay, and took around an hour to set up and get pointed in the right direction.  It's been up for several years now, and seems reliable enough.

 

At the new house I didn't even think about terrestrial TV at all, and just fitted a similar Freesat dish to the side of the house.  That seems to work every bit as well as the one at the old house.

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If the aerial is low down, try moving it horizontally to a different location to find the sweet spot, it can make a huge difference.

 

I use a masthead amplifier, primarily to boost the signal before it passes down quite a long cable, then a distribution amplifier to feed multiple points.

 

Definitely consider freesat as well, it slightly expands your choice of channels but is much more robust in bad weather.

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We have both Freview and FreeSat. We get more issues with rain and snow on FreeSat but both are rare.

 

OT: For some reason the colours on FreeSat are too saturated for my taste. This is strange because the entire path for both is digital so where is the colour change occurring? 

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5 minutes ago, Temp said:

OT: For some reason the colours on FreeSat are too saturated for my taste. This is strange because the entire path for both is digital so where is the colour change occurring? 

A lot of tv's store a different set of brightness, colour, contrast etc settings for each input, so just adjust the settings to get the freesat picture correct, and I'll bet it does not affect the freeview picture settings.

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A tip for anyone thinking of fitting a Freesat dish is to ignore the dish size guidance that is on many websites, with marked zones for each size.  Just get the very biggest dish you can afford/fit.  This is what I've done, both times, and the result is an extremely strong signal, and no interference from rain or snow.  A neighbour had one of the small, square'ish, dishes fitted and had a fair few interference problems, but these went away when he fitted a dish that's just a bit smaller than ours.  A bigger dish is also slightly easier to align, I found, as despite the slightly narrower beam width, if it's off by a degree or so it has enough gain to pull in a good signal.

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Guest Alphonsox
13 minutes ago, Temp said:

We have both Freview and FreeSat. We get more issues with rain and snow on FreeSat but both are rare.

 

I had the same very occasional issues in rain/snow. These were cured by fitting an oversized dish to increase the gain.

 

Edit: Cross posted with Jeremy

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