Any Aerial installers here?

[mathmos]

I've got a fairly new house (less than three years old) which shares a communal sat dish, but we each have our own house aerials. So Sky is fine, but last night I lost all freeview on all our TV's (1 main TV downstairs and 2xsmall TV's in the bedrooms). I've tried re-tuning everything in, but the TV's are not picking up any channels.

I've been up in the loft and I've got this -


I've tried powering it all off, leaving it for 10 mins then restart and things improved slightly in that I picked up about 8 freeview channels, but the signal was really low and the picture is pretty much unwatchable. Prior to this I was getting upwards of 50 channels, includiong the HD freeview channels....so something isn't right somewhere!

Does anyone recognise the kit we have? any suggestions on what could be wrong?

[headcase]

The white box on the top is a mast head amp power supply, the box with the number is a modulator (do you have cctv? or possibly a door intercom?)
So, you will have a wire from the Aerial connecting to the whit box then one from the white box to the UHF IN on the big blue box, if you have lost signal on all TV's then the problem will lie there, either aerial has shifted so not aligned correctly, the white box has gone faulty, or bad connections between all 3. The only way to be sure is to use a meter so basically a job for an aerial man.

[mathmos]

Thanks for the feedback....yeah we have a small camera on the front door so that would explain the modulator.

The aerial itself is inside the loft space and no one has been up there in some time so I am guessing it hasn't moved so maybe one of the boxes has gone pop (although they all have lights on still).

[headcase]

All you can do is check the connections are good, other than that you cant really fault find without a meter or just swap boxes blind but you will find only garages do that

[cjs]

First thing I would check is the masthead amp, there will probably be a box near the aerial, you could bypass this and also the white power supply, you'll need some F connector joiners. Or run a cable direct from the aerial to the distribution amp. See if this improves the signal.

If you have a volt meter you could test if the PSU is giving out a voltage, although the red LED is on this does not mean it is working.

Do the neighbours still get Freeview?

[mathmos]

ok all solved

I hauled a TV up to the loft last night and tried taking the connection direct from the aerial, bypassing the masthead amp and I picked up all the freeview channels, if I add it back in the number of channels I have drops to 8. So I've just taken it out of the loop and all the TV's in the house are getting a good signal and are picking up all the channels. So I guess it's either faulty, or with the amp in line the signal may be to strong since the digital switch over. Either way I've ditched it and everything is back to normal.

Thanks for the help all!