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Freeview
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
Do you need an aerial to use freeview? I was thinking of getting a freeview box for my room but the aerial is in the living room.
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freeview.co.uk
Depending the the area you live in you might find you will need to buy a frequency booster to receive all channels, you can find out buy setting it up first and installing.
There's some website I saw ages ago - you type in your postcode and it tells you how far you are from the TV Transmitters.
If you're close enough you might get away with a portable antenna
It's how i run my box, from an indoor aerial and it works perfectly fine 99% of the time, the reason it doesnt is because there is construction work outside with two giant cranes otherwise it would be 100%.
Freeview can be used with, preferebly a roof aerial, wideband, it's longer with more prongs on it to receive a better higher quality signal .. or an indoor aerial which can work just as fine. Never guarenteed but always worth a try.
If possible try to only use a direct connection from aerial right to the box so as to minimise loss of signal
i find that as well, i have freeview in the bedroom with a portable ariel, and have to point the ariel one way for half the channels, and point it the another way for the other channels.
and if your tempted dont get "Freesat" from sky, none of the freeview music channels, no E4, in their place are 300 american shopping channels ... useless!
Reception where i am is very poor, and since the dish was already on the house when i got it, it seemed the easiest choice to buy a digibox off ebay for £20, and a viewing card for another £20. Freeview for £40 (which was cheaper than the freeview boxes at the time)
I find it rather tempting, especially as they giving away free broadband with the subcription now, but value for money is very poor with sky. if i could, i'd have ntl straight away!
I'd never look to sky for anything personally, i have broadband from Ntl:Telewest and if i wanted another service i would get it from them, better everything from them.
I love Freeview though. A lot of people i know dislike it thinking it's shite but it suits me perfectly, theres almost always something on on at least one station i can watch and if there isnt then thats fine because my box is a freeview recorder so i can watch something i previously recorded.
Win win for me
See mines the opposite. Ntl treated us appalingly, and I know it's the same for a lot of people around this area of my town, including peridodically cutting us all off (TV internet AND phone lines) for no known reason.
Plus it seems to be 40 quid per month to get anything decent, which is robbery.
Freeview on the other hand is free, and pretty fast with the tv.
THough i cannot speka personally i have heard so many bad things about NTL, which is why i felt them merging with Telewest would never be a good idea, because they are so shockingly awefull. Telewest on the other hand have been a fantastic company. I've never had any problems with them, i got an amazing deal for my broadband from them and they are FAR better for pricing than sky for TV packages..
Top tier package with Sky = +£40
Top tier package with Telewest = £17.50 [though you do have to take a phoneline from £11, which is still cheaper]
I just think Sky take the utter piss with their pricing.
Bottom line, Stay away from Sky.
Freeview is fantastic, i dont care what anyone who hates it says. It has enough channels to cater for lots of various people with some channels even dedicated to certain groups or people, i.e women, men, or kids. New channels are often appearing too for which their is no cost either. It has interactive features, digital radio and great picture quality. I will go as far as to say that, with my freeview recorder using an indoor aerial i actually get a better picture than our Sky box with Freesat downstairs.
How can you beat that ?
I ran a long extension from the living room (wall aerial) to my room and when i done a search, no channels could be found. My wall aerial has never worked with the living room TV but we have Cable anyway. The aerial has been checked (apparently) and is said to be in working order.
So I connected a wire to run to my room via a little device, dunno what it's called but basically the wire from the cable box goes into one prong, the wire running to my room goes into the other and the third prong goes into the back of the TV.
This time the box actually found channels but out of the 5 terrestrial I only get Channel 5. I get the radio channels (some no signal), UK Gold, Cartoon network, E4 etc (Scrambled)
It hasn't found any of the other channels and i receive little or no signal for any of them.
Rah! Help!
For the price it does have some good viewing, better than freesat as freeview has E4 and More 4, whereas skys alternative is Reality channel and 300 shopping/quiz channels.
I was impressed too with the quality of freeview, as when it was first launched on OnDigital, there were stories of bad quality and "blocky" pictures.
my experience has been the other way round, i find Skys menus and speed at bringing up channels is much better than freeview and especially ntl, (which is appauling!) mind you freeview boxes are made by many different people, mine can be unresponsive at times and slow, but then again my box cost £25!
Signal is also better with sky, i have had it a year and ive had the "no signal" about 3 times, each lasting 30 seconds at most. i think its better due to the fact that the dish is high on a wall and does not move, and attracts less interfererance. My freeview however is very touch and go with signal, i have to point the aerial one way for half the channels, and another direction for the others. plus people moving within the house and electrical items disturb the signal.