Tilting a Television Aerial

[charles]

but that's not straight up.

[bert]

In article , Jimbo ... writes

Copper nails

[Jonno]

john west scribbled

Bin it and install a freesat dish with a nice box. It'll work out cheaper than a new aerial and you'll get more channels.

[Peter Hill]

I've got a loft aerial.

10 "element", 8 flat directors, dipole, reflector plate. It's wedged as far up to the apex as it will go.

There was engineering a few weeks ago, reduced signal on the HD multiplex, I lost all HD channels. I tried a "48 element" wideband high gain aerial, 10 "X" directors, a flat director, dipole and 8 bar reflector. Due to it's length and size of reflector it was about 1ft lower in loft than the short aerial. I lost more channels. Taking the upper 1/2 of the reflector off improved it a bit but not a lot.

Just had to suffer channel loss until the signal was back to full strength.

[Big Les Wade]

Peter Hill posted

[snip]

We've had the same, except that I wasn't able to verify definitely that it was caused by engineering works. The Freeview website said there weren't any, and I don't know any way of checking what they say.

But given the evidence I don't see how it could have been anything else: suddenly we had a much poorer signal on most channels, which lasted for a few weeks, and then it was suddenly all right again, without my having changed anything in the meantime (apart from fiddling with the aerial direction, which made no difference).

The Freeview helpline guy suggested it might be something to do with high atmospheric pressure, but I checked that against the barometer and it wasn't correlated at all.

The only other possibility AFAICS was trees, and there aren't any trees in the line of sight for at least four hundred meters.

[Capitol]

Can it feed 15 TV points?

[Andy Burns]

Not by itself, but ...

[alan_m]

These days you may have been better off with a short log periodic in the loft.

[tony sayer]

Good bandwidth .. not so good with gain 'tho...

[Robin]

So it's now not just a freesat dish with *a* nice box but a freesat dish with quatro LNB plus multiswitch plus *N* boxes (where N is the number of TVs/PVRs/PCs etc currently fed from the aerial)? And all without any idea whether there is a suitable site for a dish without eg trees between it and the satellite?

I think it'd be easier and cheaper to at least try first a wander about with an aerial in the loft (after reading Bill's advice on how [not] to do it of course!).

[Andy Burns]

Same as most others, my suggestion was to get the aerial up higher ...

[Robin]

Although I don't think anyone who did so has mentioned that it might be worth checking first what type of tree it is. Eg if it's growing at 1 to 2 feet a year raising the aerial could become interesting.

[alan_m]

A 'low gain' aerial that is only just over a metre long and very compact could work a lot better than a physically medium to large higher gain conventional aerial in a loft space where fitting will always be compromised to avoid the metal fasteners in the roof trusses and the water tank etc.

Although my log periodic is now mounted on the chimney stack, before I had my roof replaced, and before analogue switch off, it was loft mounted. It worked perfectly in an area 20 miles from the transmitter. This is in a location where aerial installers local to me seem very keen on installing very large yagi or the tri boom models.

[tony sayer]

Well if space is at a premium, but the Yagi if not stretched to what it doesn't do best still outperforms the Log..

Well if the signal field is there and the path is good I'd expect it would.

However a lot of the rigging trade was well on the make before digital switchover and I expect some may well have retired early on the proceeds;!(.

You can see some of those aerial bling things around this way barely 17 miles of fairly flat land to Sandy Heath so someone was 'aving a larff;!...