"Freeview on an indoor arial." Topic

The rough and ready test to see if you can get Freeview in the UK is to see how good your Channel 5 is.

Have just replaced portable and ariel in the Kitchen, and now (for the first time) have a Ch5- thogh still speckly/snowy.

Does any one know if those 'power boost' ariels are any good?- the ones that plug into the mains. Any recommendations to indoor aerials- the current one is the kind that has 2 waves on it that get smaller towards the connection end- a bit like a christmas tree/

Thanks

Don't waste your money on those consumer grade power boost antennas.

There is (likely) an amplifier inside them but all it does is amplify the power and noise so your TV won't get any improvement.

Most likely, the pre-amp of your TV has better performance than the amp in the antenna so you would likely see worse performance.

If you go outdoor antenna and put an amplifier at the top, you will counteract some of the effects of the cable but even that isn't going to help much.

"Does any one know if those 'power boost' ariels are any good?- the ones that plug into the mains."

With one, I got about half the channels on a portable freeview system that otherwise wouldn't get any – it just had a telescopic "radio" style thing which was OK for normal TV but got nothing on freeview. I picked up a cheapish "dish" shaped amplfier, and pointing in the right direction it picked up a useful number of channels.

If you've already got a proper arial it's probably not going to help. In some areas (well. Half the country) there was something about needing to upgrade outdoor ariels to get all of the channels.

The only way to be fairly sure of getting Freeview on an internal arial is to have direct LOS to the transmitter and put it in a window. The power boost arials are useless for Freeview.

In our area you need an arial upgrade, but it was much cheaper than I'd feared (a couple of hundred quid including three internal sockets) and works really well. Certainly much cheaper than forking out annual subs for Virgin Media…

We have one of those little indoor aerials (witha loop and two telescopic aerials) attached to the telly in the spare room, and with a bit of repositioning it picked up all the Freeview channels that we can get on the outdoor aerial. It does need to be sited in the window, and it does need both telescopic aerials at full stretch (about three feet long), but it really does work as well as the outdoor one.

CraigH,
We had someone say something similar to us. Then we turned off the booster and they could see what a difference it made. Without it, the picture was unwatchable. With it, most channels were fine most of the time.
We did eventually get it replaced with a taller aerial and a proper booster which is better. We live in an area which is still listed as no Freeview coverage but we get it fine – until a local chav goes riding around on an unsilenced motorbike which plays havoc with reception.
Get an aerial booster from Argos. If it doesn't work you should be able to take it back no problem.

Well, if you turn off the booster, you might have effectively disconnected the antenna – depends on the design.

All an amplifier at the set is doing is amplifying the signal and the noise so the TV won't be any better off. If the signal is in the noise at the antenna, it will still be in the noise after amplification – that amplifier can't tell the difference.

Depends on your geography basically; I'm in the same area as Martin, and my regular arial shouldn't in theory work, but I'm up a hill with good LOS and it does…. As for amplifying, "what they said" – an amplifier amplifies the fuzz as well; you probably want a bigger and /or higher up arial.

Dom.

Just my 2 pence worth about amplified antennas or signal boosters or pre-amps in general. WE used to scratchbuild those things for practise when I was a young private and Avionics Technician from plans from electronic magazines and popular mechanics.

Any decent plan, and all the commercial models I was aware of had noise filters as an inherent part of the design.
Basically it pre-amped the signal to make it strong enough to filter, then ran it through a band pass filter to reject most of the noise before sending it to the main amplifier circuit.
With a decent combination of band-pass and band-reject filters you can get a really amazing signal boost with almost no added noise.

That being said, I'd try to ask the salesman or check online to see if you can find the circuit drawing for the amplifier before you buy one. If it has 1 or 2 filter circuits it's almost certain to be a quality design.

Thinking way back now, the old rotary channel tuners on old TVs were just a bunch of selectable and very narrow band-pass filters. It only let the frequency through for the channel it was selected to.
(Oh no! A dangling participle! There goes my high school English trophy)

Thanks guys. I might connect the indoor arial to the PVR in the front room to see what that does- the kitchen has better reception I think. I'm in Aylesbury, and the box says the transmitter is 'Oxford' could be less than 20 miles.

All Freeview should be better when the switch off the analogue, as they will then boost the digital signal.

Mackster, I think you are overestimating sales assistants. With the 'warehouse' style 'boxes' destroying the independents, there are very few who know what they are talking about selling things in the UK.

@The Mackster

The trouble is, you can't filter out in-band noise which is usually the problem. Or, more accurately, if the signal is buried in the noise, no amount of filtering can fix that.

Having said that, obviously pre-amps have their uses in the right application as you mentioned.

I would just challenge the quality of the usually cheap filtering in the antenna compared to the filtering in the TV set itself.

Didn't just turn off the amp – reconnected directly too. The reason we bought the amp in the first place was because the signal was so bad. The amp made it watchable.

Curiosity insists I ask: What's Freeview?