How to tell if you need a new TV Aerial for your television. As an aerial & satellite installation engineer, I often get phone calls from people asking if they need a new aerial as they are experiencing problems with their TV picture. This is a question that is not that had to find the answer for if the customer just did a few. Firstly, if experiencing problems with the Television reception, the first thing to do is to check the connections. This means looking at the back of the TV and checking to see if the aerial cable which has a coax plug on the end of it is firmly plugged into the correct port in the TV. You'd be amazed at how many times I have been out to customers houses and found that the reason they are experiencing picture glitch is because the aerial is not correctly plugged into the back of the TV. Its such a simple thing to check too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_aerial_plug  

Secondly the next thing to check is whether the aerial cable is still attached to the TV Aerial Antenna . These are usually fixed on the chimney using a lashing kit and mast. Or the aerial & mast is fixed on a stand off bracket on the wall of the house. Finally the last place to check is in the loft. What you need to look for is any obvious damage or , such as the cable has come loose or the aerial antenna is in some way damaged or pointing in the wrong direction.  

There is another DIY check that can be done if you have another working aerial socket in the home. If you have the extra TV point, then take the TV into that room and plug it in, if experiencing problems with it then it would definitely point to there being a problem with your Aerial Antenna. If not then it maybe just the aerial cable that is the cause of the interference. This maybe just a simple cabling replacement job, and you can avoid going to the expense of changing your whole TV digital aerial system.  

At the end of the day there maybe nothing that can be detected through these checks and you would need the assistance of a qualified TV Aerial Installation Engineer to run a full test on the system using a spectrum analyzer. But if you have performed the checks mentioned above first you will rule out having to pay for a call out charge just for the aerial fitter to plug the aerial into the back of the TV. 

Having problems with your you view box? Then our not alone. When ever we as 'Aerial & Satellite Engineers' have attended a property where the home owner has a you view box, invariably the frustrated customer is pretty unhappy with the functionality of the you view box and the service received from either BT or Talk Talk. However, this is not to say that this is the beginning of the end for the problematic platform as a report published just the other day reveals...

Want to talk through your options for free to air TV such as Freeview or Freesat, then call our Aerial & Satellite Engineer for the best advice tailored to you.

The reasons why you get picture Freeze is due to a few common problems with digital signals in general. Digital signals are more affected than analogue signals by poor carrier to noise and impulse noise. Of course, other forms of interference affect both analogue and digital signals, but impulse noise is by its very definition impulsive. The susceptibility of DTT signals to impulse noise is an important factor when making a good digital installation since it interrupts the data stream of picture information & corrupts that data. This can result in locked pictures, pixilation or total blanking. The well known ones are car ignition picked up on the aerial, electric fences, mercury arc lighting, or a home heating thermostat arcing causing spikes which travel through the coax cable. Both will eventually arrive at the digital tuner. Although increasing the signal level could help by improving the carrier to noise ratio, impulse noise is often greater than the wanted signal.

It is not difficult to protect the digital signal from impulse noise by using well screened components. However a TV Aerial is designed to collect signals, so cannot be screened. What a good aerial does is collect only the good signal and reject the bad signals.

The Log Periodic TV Aerial is ideal for the purpose as it rejects the impulse noise noise by a 15db margin whilst picking up the good TV signal just like a high gain aerial would. We generally will only use these TV Aerials in our installations for obvious reasons.