Over the years we had upgraded our 40-plus year-old installation, changed ribbon lead to coaxial cable and added a UHF antenna when SBS came on line.

We enjoyed an excellent analogue picture, installed a set-top box and could not receive all the digital channels so decided to replace the tired old aerial that had elements missing.

Hills Industries recommended changing to a (Digitel DY 14) high gain antenna, retain the UHF antenna and use F type fittings; they told me their C16 “box” phased array aerial is an old design and not cut for a digital signal – the C16 is the most common type used in the district!

Replacing the aerial only helped, so back to Hills, and eventually we were told to call an “expert” – this was embarrassing as in the early days installed dozens of antennas when working for the “Everything Electrical” shop.

A local contractor’s solution was an amplifier, this cut out my four-way splitter as the amplifier’s power is fed up coax cable from behind TV.

I was not happy with this solution as to me an amplifier does not improve signal quality, only signal strength, to overcome long runs, splitters and poor connections.

Next step was to do away with the amplifier, replace the old coaxial cable with RG6 low loss cable and the diplexer, four-way splitter and connections that had the new low loss twist on F type connectors.

After this upgrade we received the 14 main HD channels, but found our first cheap set-top box was not capable of receiving all channels!

David Spackman

Watervale