I am given an option for the TV wiring for my new built property. They are installing the wiring and have asked whether I need Cable wiring or Standard Antenna wiring.?
What would be better? Is there a difference?
Sidney
Well, are you going to have an aerial or are you going to have cable TV?
Christian.
"Christian McArdle" wrote > Well, are you going to have an aerial or are you going to have cable TV?
What is better in terms of choise/ cost? And Future proof? Is the cable any different? I'like a cable that can take both?
Sidkney
Terrestrial will be cheaper, as in free. Cable will cost a monthly fee, but have a much larger range of channels.
Well, the cable for cable TV comes out of the ground. The cable for the aerial goes to the roof. You're not going to be able to use one for the other. I think you need to decide what sort of TV you will be having. You could always ask for both systems to hedge your bets, although this will cost more.
Look at:
Put the postcode in to find if services are available in your area.
If you're going for cable, you need to decide if you will have a cable phone or a BT phone. This may also determine which sort of broadband internet you can choose from. ADSL requires a BT phone line, whilst a cable modem will require you to have cable television.
Christian.
What type of property?
Just to be clear on this - a cable modem doesn't mean you have to have a cable TV service. It does mean that you will have to have a cable out of the ground in the same way as cable tv though (which is what I suspect Christian was meaning).
I've got cable broadband with ntl and no TV or phone from them. Cable appears out of the ground into a little box and then up the wall into the loft where the cable modem is. You do however then have to put up with NTLs hard sell on their other products (I think they have got the message from me finally :))
Darren
Ah, they've changed their policy, then. When I got the cable originally, there was a policy that you had to have TV as well, but could go for the minimum package. Otherwise you had to pay an additional fee, which was equal to the cost of the cheapest TV package.
Christian.
To future proof you should get both - this will allow you to have normal analogue terrestrial, digital terrestrial (in the form of Freeview via a set top box/DVB capable TV) or you may decide to pay for a cable TV subscription in the future.
P.S. They are often quite pessimistic. NTL insisted that they couldn't provide service to my house and wouldn't accept that they did until I asked whether that meant they wouldn't be picking up the previous resident's set top boxes.
The freeview predictor claims that I can't get digital terrestrial either. They appear to have failed to tell my set top box, though, which gets all the multiplexes.
Christian.
"TheScullster" wrote in> What type of property?
Bungalow, 4 bedroom with a granny annex, 1 room
Sidney
It would be better to get someone who knows about TV aerial installation to do the job as you want it done, with outlets where you want them. Do you want terrestrial TV, satellite TV, cable, FM, DAB? Do you want separate digiboxes in each room or the output from one digibox piped round the house? Do you want VCR/CCTV/Tivo/Skyplus? ...
Those are meaningless terms from a price list.
Owain
Same here. It turns out that they recommend transmitter A, which is roughly west of here, at a distance of 40 miles, with intervening 'stuff'.
I use transmitter B (not mentioned), which is south east of here, nearer, and is on a taller mast.
I can see that part of our town can't 'see' B at all; thus the generalisation. The only real way is to suck it and see. We got an almost acceptable signal with a grotty old antenna; much improved with a new one!
In article , Bob Eager writes
Those predictors are just that, a prediction, and they are very general. We use similar software and that will give far more accurate predictions but there is no reasonable way that you can take a postcode area and cover every location in that, hence the generalisation!.
They cannot take into account local obstructions like buildings and other obstructions other than adding in an "urban clutter" factor which can be very variable!...
Have it done in good quality satellite co-ax. This will be fine for either UHF or cable.
Oh yes they can. The UK planning model for DTT uses real clutter data - see for example:
My original point was that they had apparently taken a fixed point of reference for my postcode area (rather than postcode). And that area extends from here (about 25m a.s.l.) down to sea level. Houses at sea level can't 'see' the transmitter to the south-east, so they gave data for the transmitter that *can* be seen (lower power, lower antenna, further away) to the west.
The clutter factor didn't enter into it for me; just contours.
I was just responding to Tony's more general point about the use/non-use of clutter data. Whether it's used in the public postcode predictor I'm not sure, but that does tend to err on the pessimistic side, to avoid disappointment due to marginal reception. As you say postcodes can be too coarse a granularity - the % population served predictions are done on the basis of 100m squares, IIRC, and they're working toward getting that down to 50m. There might be other reasons why it doesn't offer TX B as an option for you, such as not being free from excessive co-channel or adjacent channel interference for >=99% of the time.
It would be nice if there were a Web-based predictor that accepted an NGR and RX antenna height and returned predicted field strengths for candidate TXs together with a list of potential interferers and their directions, etc. - but with all the spectrum planning people busy on the Great Switch-over Plan, that won't happen.
Yes, but we were talking about the postcode predictor were we not?, and that is inherently inaccurate because a postcode can cover quite a large area. So much so that the elevation could vary by a very significant amount in the given area, so you have to take a mean value hence the inaccuracies of this method.
In practice however its just an indication and nothing more, and perhaps better then the more conventional maps that are used such as coverage maps from the BBC for example.....
Hmmm. I suspect it is rare for a postcode to cover more than a small street or a row of houses on a large one. I would think it particularly unusual to cover a wide range of elevations, unless the street is extremely steep.
Christian.
I agree. However, I wonder if they actually 'group' postcodes. My street is pretty well flat, and yet the DTG predictor definitely 'chooses' the wrong transmitter; I'm pretty sure that it's considering a lot of adjacent postcodes too.
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