Problems with TV reception

[rocket5]

We moved into our house in July last year and immediately redecorated the living room. Whilst we were doing that we 'lived' in the dining room: our TV worked fine in that room (plugged into the aerial cord coming out of the wall).

Since we've moved back into the living room, we've had major TV reception issues. The aerial cord in this room is in bad shape so doesn't work when we plug it into the TV. Currently, we therefore have a Telecam TCE 2001 Signal Booster plugged into our TV and are trying to get TV through a Freeview box. We can, however, only get BBC1 and 2, E4+1 (but not E4 weirdly...) SkyNews and some other random channels. So it seems that the Telecam is working but not for every channel, which I don't understand.

It's driving me crazy. Is there anything I can do other than pay a fortune to get a new aerial cord fitted? We live in S London, about 4 miles away from an aerial (no hills and our neighbours have good reception).

Thanks

If you mean 4 miles from Crystal Palace, then have you tried any 'set top' aerials ? I would hope that if it is that small a distance you'd get something strong enough to provide you with all/most channels rather than the hit/miss situation you have at present.

You might want to go to www.digitaluk.co.uk and can do a postcode check (right hand side), but tick the 'industry' box and then on the following screen you should get a detailed page showing various transmitters and dates.

For Crystal Palace, today, the channels being used are: 22, 25, 28, 29, 32, 34, and 31 (for HD signals).

Given some are close together and you have had some channels missing, you might want to wipe out all channels and then go to manual set up, and go through the channel numbers above, so the box can 'identify' any new signals found.

In automatic scanning, it might skip from 28 past 29 (leaving a gap in channel line up in menu) and on to 31 or 32.

Good luck!

Fantastic - thank you so much!

When digital switchover takes place at Crystal Palace in 2012, there will be a couple of dates on which you will need to retune. The channel numbers used will be the same but different sets of signals (eg BBC, Ch 4) will be swapped over for reasons only known to the planners. Some places will have at least 8 channel changes over the next 2-3 years.