Which indoor TV aerial

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Hi.

I live about 6 miles from a TV transmitting station. I always used an Outdoor Aerial. With my new TV I am about to get an Indoor Aerial.

Some models are suitable up 10 miles from transmitter, various others range up to 100 miles.

Would it make sense to get one up to say 40, 50 miles ?. Not familiar with these. Thank you.
 
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The claimed ranges will be meaningless and probably not much different anyway. The thing to determine usability will be very local conditions, buildings and trees around you - best really is a proper outdoor antenna.
 
@Harry Bloomfield is correct. If we were playing Indoor Aerial Top Trumps, then the manufacturer's claims is always a low-scoring card.

Look at the top half of the image below. It shows a house where the owner can virtually see the transmitter from a window in their living room. Unless the transmitter was very low-powered, or the aerial really quite poor or incorrectly aligned, then chances are that you could buy any of the indoor aerials, stick it on the windowsill, and get some reasonable reception.

The lower half of the image shows a house where the living room is on the opposite side of the building, so there's no direct line-of-sight to the transmitter. This will change the signal level getting to the aerial. We call this field strength. Since it's not possible to increase the field strength, then the only practical way of improving the chance of getting some reception is either to increase the efficiency of the aerial, or to amplify the signal. However, the outcome of the two methods is very different.

Increasing the efficiency of the aerial either means adding more metal (a bigger aerial) or tuning the aerial to the specific frequency range that the local transmitter is using. These tuned aerials are referred to as Group aerials*, but they have a design that makes them unsuitable for use in a living room or similar. They're okay for lofts though.

A living room aerial has to be compact, so regular Group aerials are out, they're just too big, but the flat mini Log Periodic type is actually pretty good as an indoor aerial. Compared to the regular amplified indoor aerials it has more metal and so generates a better quality signal in most cases.

In all cases, signal Quality is king. That's where the super-duper-high-gain-ultra-amplified retail indoor aerials suck. They're designed to look acceptable in a living room or bedroom or similar, and that compromises the amount of metal that it's possible to design in to the space. Less metal equals a poorer signal Quality. To try to compensate, they apply massive amounts of amplification, but all they succeed in doing is making a lousy signal much louder.

Where someone can get one of the highly amplified indoor aerials to work, it's more likely to be because the local field strength was good enough to run a simple mini Log Periodic, so it's in spite of the amplification rather than because of it.

Which ever aerial type you decide to go for, have a look at your neighbours roof aerials. You're looking not only at the direction they're pointing, but also whether the aerial is horizontally or vertically aligned as it points towards the transmitter. This is called polarisation. It's a way of making sure that the smaller relay transmitters used to fill in the dead spots don't interfere with the main transmitter signals where the two overlap.


5vAp5v.jpg





* Technically speaking, a Log Periodic is still a Group aerial, but it covers the entire frequency spectrum and we call it a Group T aerial.



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No hard and fast rule, I have tv in nearly every room [9 in total] and use all three types listed in all location, they all work, I'm over 30 miles from Crystal palace , my signal source.
 
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No hard and fast rule, I have tv in nearly every room [9 in total] and use all three types listed in all location, they all work, I'm over 30 miles from Crystal palace , my signal source.

Yep. All to do with field strength.

CP transmits at 200,000 Watts for the muxes that carry the main public service (BBC) and commercial (ITV) channels. There are no other Freeview transmitters more powerful than this is the UK. It's a lot of power. To put that in to some kind of perspective, my local transmitter is Winter Hill (Granada region, max power 100kW per mux). It's a little over 30 miles from me, and on a roof-mounted low gain aerial I get enough signal that I could divide it down to one four-thousandth (1/4000) of it's received level and still get 80~100% on Quality despite the online field strength predictions saying that I need a high gain aerial with extra amplification.

Due 50 degrees East from where my aerial points is the Yorkshire transmitter at Emley Moor. It's on the other side of the Pennines, almost 50 miles away, and with the aerial pointing the wrong way I can still get perfect Yorkshire TV for BBC and ITV too.

Everything is about field strength. That's why the reviews for these indoor aerials vary so widely.


If this or any other reply was helpful to you, then do the decent thing and click the T-H-A-N-K-S button. It appears when you hover the mouse pointer near the Quote Multi-quote buttons. This is the proper way to show your thanks for the time and help someone gave you.
 
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Hi.

I live about 6 miles from a TV transmitting station. I always used an Outdoor Aerial. With my new TV I am about to get an Indoor Aerial.

Some models are suitable up 10 miles from transmitter, various others range up to 100 miles.

Would it make sense to get one up to say 40, 50 miles ?. Not familiar with these. Thank you.

Why do you want to get an indoor aerial suddenly? A new TV is a expensive investment. Why spoil it with a crappy signal?

They are lying quoting ranges in miles, you just cannot measure aerials like that. Receiving TV over 100 miles is generally not possible, the curvature of the earth gets in the way. Be great if you could, we would only need a few transmitters to cover the UK.

Back to your indoor aerial. Get one that looks like a small outdoor aerial. Don't get a fancy plastic blob and don't get an amplified one.
But best of all use the outdoor aerial you have always used.
 
In this order of preference:

#1 an outdoor aerial

#2 a loft aerial

#3 a compact Log Periodic for in-room use

#4 (last resort, but only for aesthetic reasons) one of these indoor amplified aerials


The Wolfbane site predicts pretty decent field strength for somewhere like Panborough (7 miles from the Mendip transmitter), but you have to remember that it's only a rough guide based on entire postcode areas. It doesn't take account of local geographic variations, so, for example, if you live behind a wood or there are large buildings between your place and the transmitter then you'll get a lot less signal. Equally, someone living on the 12th floor of a block of flats facing the Mendip transmitter could probably get away with a simple bit of coax as an aerial.

Wolfbane for my home address recommends a high gain amplified aerial. That couldn't be further from true if they tried. I have a very low gain aerial, and it produces so much signal that I could split it to feed every room in the house with no additional amplification at all.

The point is that everything is theoretical until you try something on site.


If signal strength is so high, why not just use one of the indoor aerials from Argos / Currys / supermarket etc?

The answer is that most of them carry too much amplification. There's a risk of drowning the TV's tuner in a noisy over-amplified signal. The result is lots of picture freezing and blockiness. It looks like too little signal, but is actually over-saturation of the tuner.


What about an unamplified loop aerial then?

It's a poor second choice to a compact Log Periodic. There's not enough metal to generate a decent gap between the TV signal and the background noise. The small Log Periodic is much better.



If your aerial can't go outside or in the loft then go for the compact Log Periodic.


If this or any other reply was helpful to you, then do the decent thing and click the T-H-A-N-K-S button. It appears when you hover the mouse pointer near the Quote Multi-quote buttons. This is the proper way to show your thanks for the time and help someone gave you.
 
Thanks to everyone for advice.

I bought one of the Log Periodic aerials, Labgear. Works perfectly. I mounted it on a leftover piece of 32 mm white waste pipe, just stick it behind the TV. Blends in well with the background..
 

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