Edinburgh Reviews

Home | Add Review | Account | About

Digital TV Signal Booster

Labels: Freeview, Portobello, TV
Reviewer: Andrew
Date: 30/11/2005
Rating: 2/5

Digital TV Signal Booster I am fond of my expensive but clever Digifusion Freeview Recorder. It has twin tuners so I can watch one channel and record another. Ah yes, the box records up to 80Gig of TV!

... then I moved to Portobello. Um. It took me a while to notice (mainly because I'm a news geek and just watch the news channels) but a few of the core channels simply are unwatchable.

I checked the roof top aerial and it seems fine. If the aerial is not working then it's a tricky problem; it's bolted on to the chimney so I'm not going to be able to change its direction myself.

A bit of research (again made possible by the rather good Digifusion freeview box) told me that I was picking up my signal(s) from the Black Hill transmitter. I had about a 50% signal strength and that was just about good enough. The issue was that I was also receiving a whack of errors with the signal and that was corrupting the broadcast.

Rather than consider Sky or Telewest (which would render my Digifusion useless and tie me to a contract when I just rent the place) or deal with aerial repair men - I looked for a plug'n'play solution.

When it comes to electronic stuff I do tend to go online to Maplin. It's here that I found a digital signal booster. The concept is that you can plug this into the mains and put it in between the TV and the aerial.

In the end I ordered the "Digital TV Signal Booster" with the product code L73AN. This is a review of the signal booster.

It kinda works. I've improved the signal strength by about 5% to 10%. The result is that some of the sketchy channels are now fine.

Unfortunately the problem is not fully cured. I can watch some of the Freeview channels all of the time but I can't watch all of channels some of the time.

A catch to watch when ordering the Digital TV Signal Booster from Maplin (which seems to object to deep links) is that you do not get the vital TV - to - Booster connection cord. Thankfully I had one. My own personal electrical requirements meant that I had to buy a whopping eight-way power extender. One of the issues here in Argyle Crescent in Portobello is that the houses are old and the electrical points are few.

The Digital Signal Booster is not expensive. I recommend it to those people who just need to boost their signal a little. If you want to get the best possible Freeview reception then this device, or one like it, cannot do wrong. If you have a semi-serious reception issue the economical device probably does not have enough juice for you.