Do they work?
I have a Freeview TV with an indoor aerial, I wasn't expecting much but it works well most of the time. But occasionally it's unwatchable.
I'll get a proper aerial if necessary but wondering if a booster would help.
Indoor aerials seldom work reliably. But if you do get a reasonable signal (albeit unreliable) from an indoor aerial then a small log periodic in the loft may be an alternative.
With a modern set, I'd say that it is unlikely.
For the following reasons.
Back in the days of valves, RF amplifiers were expensive and so manufactures did not boost the sensitivity to the max because it would have cost a extra valve.
But these days with chips cheap as -er - chips and a transistor or ten being practically free issue inside those chips there is little point on NOT pushing the sensitivity to the point where you are up against the noise level of the input aerial itself. Boosting a poor signal to noise aerial doesn't improve signal to noise ratio.
Get a decent aerial up in your loft. You will be at least 10dB better signal to noise.
+1 I got one of those and it is compared with a rabbit eras or loop in te room chalk to cheese
Bill
I have a log periodic in the loft (before that it was an 18-element Group A Yagi). That feeds into a Labgear 6-output amplifier, which feeds coax sockets in several rooms. In general, the feed to the lounge - which is the furthest - was ok, but that was using the PVR as a feed-through to the TV. When the PVR started playing up intermittently, I got a simple 2-way amp which now feeds separately the TV and PVR from the lounge coax socket.
I didn't expect it to work, but it did and has been that way for around
5 years. The faulty PVR was replaced, but I left the 2-way amp to feed it and the TV.YMMV.
The indoor aerial will probably not be an issue with signal strength, but quality. Some sets allow you to see these percentages. If its strength, then a booster may help, if its quality, then it won't and that is because its a multi reflection issue giving rise to the poor quality. In the old days on analogue this would be ghosting in the image and usually as people moved around in the house, it would alter.
No harm in trying it of course if you have a friendly local stockist, but I'd not want to get your hopes up. Even here line of sight to the big London transmitter you still at least need a loft aerial to get all channels reliably, unless you really do want to have to stand on a chair with you arm out to get a picture on some channels. grin. Brian
And if fitting in the loft use a good quality down cable such as Webro WF100. Plenty of Ebay sellers for Webro.
Almost identical to my setup, except I have an 8 way splitter with mild gain, and used satellite grade cable to wire the house up in 2001, and have had absolutely no issues at all apart from continental interference in cold frosty weather - behind Sudbury across the sea is Amsterdam...
I successfully ran VHF and TV off the same cable simply using two sockets paralleled. If the impedance is well controlled at the booster end the mismatch at the other end is not such a big deal. And there is enough gain to use a passive 'y' belling lee splitter if needed
I have a split feed off the roof with three downcomers and, for whatever reason, the signal in one room is inadequate. A cheap booster in the room remedied that.
I'm watching less terrestrial TV now that I have decent FTTC broadband. I'm tempted to replace the external aeriel with a freesat dish when I get the stack that carries it repointed.
Why would you need to put a dish on a chimney stack? It only needs a clear view of the sky towards the satellite cluster at 28.2E. The dish could even be mounted on the ground. The signal from the satellite has already travelled 25+ thousand miles so a few more feet in mounting height is going to make no difference.
Yes, I've done that. Routing the (decent) cable through the house took me a while, but well worth it in terms of the unsightly cable draping down the wall and the aerial on the roof (conservation area). Very rarely some channels drop signal for a few moments (usually in rainy weather) but not enough to become unwatchable.
low flying Apache choppers and F15s are a bugger here.
Other houses I have been in suffer from wildly waving trees. The digital decoders are very good at sorting out and cancelling static multipath, but not variable multipath.
I didn't mean to imply that I would. The stack work will require aeriel removal; the attraction of a dish is, as you say, precisely that I can find a more accessible location, with a feed straight into the house and a distribution hub inside. Although I can't quite do ground level (except at the end of the garden) because of neighbouring buildings and trees.
Distribution hub. For satellite? I dont think so
There are various methods of distributing the output(s) from a single LNB to multiple satellite receivers, or using a unicable LNB to connect to multiple receivers.
I'd heard about the effect of rain on satellite TV reception but I'd never paid much attention until there was a monsoon-level downpour the other day, peaking at nearly 200 mm/hour. I'd been recording something at the time and I noticed that there was a major dropout for about 10 mins. Comparison of times against the rainfall graph on my weather station, all became clear - or rather, all became obscured by rainfall ;-)
It would be good if PVRs (and PVR software such as TVHeadend) had the ability to try a different tuner (eg terrestrial rather than satellite) if they find that the selected one is dropping out very badly. I'll have to suggest it to the TVHeadend people, though I doubt they'll think it's a good idea: whenever I suggest enhancements they rubbish them :-(
Not for conventiuonal LNBs. You do know what an LNB is dont you?
Its a tuner head. It is sent a signal to set it to one satellite frequency and polarisation only, It cannot manage two frequencies or polarisations at once.
There are lnb assemblies that combine their signals into one downlead, but they are not manageable by most devices.
Slight misunderstanding here. The traditional Sky[1] LNB had two possible local oscillator frequencies (Sky Q has one, which makes it even simpler[2]) and two possible polarisations. But having chosen one of these 4 alternatives then what is presented is a few hundred MHz around 1GHz, converted from the downlink at around 10GHz. Any subsequent tuner(s) can select any channel multiplexed in this several hundred MHz, without affecting another tuner using a different part of the IF bandwidth.
The most comprehensive distribution system simply uses a quad LNB, tuned to each of the 4 IF bands which are amplified and distributed as a pseudo-LNB signal which responds to the same signals as the LNB to select which IF band to present. A tuner can use one to 4 of these at a time, but obviously needs one coax connection for each; just as though it were directly connected to the LNB, but does not directly switch the LNB outputs.
Yes, you need Quattro LNB's followed by a multiswitch to distribute siganls around the house.
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