Thanks for the advice so far folks....
I have encountered another problem, which is clearly from my inexperience :\
My current plan is to fit a socket mounted on the wall where the current aerial cable comes through the wall. A fairly simple process with the advice already offered.
What I want to do it run a cable from this socket to the upstairs bedroom - quick bit of trunking up the wall, little hole in the floor, another wall mounted socket in the bedroom, bobs your uncle.
BUT my plans have been scuppered as I wanted to install a double socket in the lounge (cable access, 1 cable) so there was still an aerial socket in the lounge, and the extra cable going upstairs to the bedroom. but apparently you need 2 cables to have a double socket.
How can i get round this problem and still have a nice neat wiring solution?
Many thanks in advance. hope that actually made sense?
You want to run a second socket up to the bedroom
to do what exactly?
If it's to loop through a Sky box then, presuming you have a box with RF in/out or you have one of the i/O link attachments for a new box then the bedroom feed is simply a cable from the lounge up to the bedroom. It's not complicated.
On the other hand, if you just want a Freeview signal for the TV upstairs then I'd suggest splitting it at the branch point outside the upstairs bedroom, and then feeding each with it's own signal. This presumes there's enough signal in the first place to withstand a passive split and still maintain good signal level on the weaker channel groups.
Doing a "daisy chain" from downstairs to upstairs is what novice DIY'ers think of as an appropriate solution, but it's really not the best answer.
As a favour to a friend I did a budget job on Friday for a guy in a rented house in Winsford. He wanted exactly what you're asking for; to feed a bedroom TV from a loop in the lounge. I was called after he'd already wasted £26.99 on a "deluxe indoor aerial" from Argos.
The signal from old aerial was reasonably strong but when I metered it down by the TV socket it was barely acceptable despite the TV's own signal meter optimistically rating it as "good". I knew from experience that splitting it at the socket would probably result in no signal for either of the TVs. The problem was loads of loss due to the crappy and now aged coax which the builders had fitted back in the 90's when the estate went up. There just wasn't enough signal at the socket to stand split.
I started to explain why it wouldn't work so well but could see the guys eyes glazing over, so I said "Here, look. I'll show you." and then inserted a 6dB attenuator to simulate the effect. Sure as egg is eggs the BBC1 signal for the D-Day Commemoration just dissolved in to a pile of random squares and garbage. 6dB was a little over the exact amount of loss from a split. But given that the cable was deteriorating then it seemed prudent to include a small safety margin. Given that the BBC mux is one of the stronger signal groups, if this fell over then it wouldn't bode well for the weaker muxes.
