Freeview signal testing help!!!

[Wordupdowg]

Hello!

I'm having an issue with an ariel on my house that feeds two tv's.

I'm wanting to get a signal tester but there seem to be loads around for fairly cheap.

Can anyone recommend one "cheap and cheerful" meter that will allow me to test the signal strength of the ariel please??

I've been looking at a few for less than a tenner?!?? Any good??!???..??

Thanks

 

[Lucid]

If you own a Freeview enabled TV then you already have something far better and more accurate than any "cheap and cheerful" signal tester. You should replace "cheap and cheerful" with "cheap and dreadful" lol Seriously though, testers such as this...

... have very poor sensitivity for start. Second, it measures the power rather than the quality. IOW you could have a crap signal, put it through a powerful aerial amp which would make the 50 and 60 LEDs illuminate but still give a broken picture on TV. The 70 and 80dB lights are completely redundant. If your TV gets a signal strong enough to make those light up then chances are it will overload the TV's tuner. Final part of of this damning review is that the steps between the signal levels are far too large. Every 3dB difference is equal to doubling or halving the signal strength. To make a 10dB difference you'd have to point the aerial in completely the opposite direction to the transmitter. That hardly makes the meter a good fine tuning tool.

Save your money. Use the Signal Strength and Signal Quality bars on your TV's tuning menu. The most important display is Quality (Q). Get that to 80%+ if possibe. Strength is hardly that important at all. Your TV will be quite happy with 50-70%. Too much signal strength is just as bad as too little.


BTW.... it's spelled aerial.

 

[Wordupdowg]

Whoops, thanks for that!

i'll try the signal tester to test my AERIALS.

I have three on my house, two work great and the third seems to give a weaker signal! I've tried boosters to the tv's but doesn't make much difference.

Thanks again

 

[Lucid]

All a booster will do is increase the power (S). It won't do anything for the quality (Q). Use your TV's signal meter to look at Q and S. Then it's down to the basics of checking over the plugs to see if they're wired correctly. Beyond that you're in to diagnosing whether there's a problem with the aerial or the cable from it via any amplification other than a set-back booster.

 

[Sam Gangee]

Local planning regulations normally forbid the installation of more than two aerials outdoors. Are they all pointing at the same transmitter? If so, you can throw two away and employ a splitter or a masthead amplifier - depending on how strong the signal is and how many TVs you want to feed.

This page gives help for freeview faults:
http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/freeview_problems.htm

 

[ericmark]

I see two TV's and assume one aerial feeds both? Lucid is repeating what I have heard many times, rubbish in means rubbish out any amplifying needs to be done before any cable splits. Yes some sets are deaf and amplifiers may work years ago I used a liner amplifier with a switch-able pre-amp and yes with my deaf set you could really hear the difference. But with other peoples radio's one only got more white noise.

As with my radio the best S meter is the built in one. So use the one built into TV or set-top box. With my satellite set top box you can actually set it to make noise rather than read the meter which can help. As yet never really had to attenuate signals however I only transmit at low power but have heard of damage being caused by very strong signals.

I have one huge advantage I check my aerials by transmitting and measuring the difference between signal out and reflected signal and if good enough to transmit then should be good enough to receive. However we do from time to time get unusual results had an aerial with a perfect transmit but no receive then found not the aerial but had left a dummy load on the aerial wire.

As Lucid says it's what the TV does that matters not what the meters show. Where the pro's meter excels is they can set their meter to receive a set channel and that's exactly what your TV does.

 

[bernardgreen]

but no receive then found not the aerial but had left a dummy load on the aerial wire.

You are not the only one to have done that....