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How much does a new TV aerial installation cost these days?

Started by canadagoose, April 18, 2018, 08:03:54 PM

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canadagoose

I've moved into a new flat, and there doesn't seem to be an aerial point anywhere. Trust me, I've looked everywhere. I've got the TV set up next to the window just now, with a set-top aerial perched on top of a cabinet, but it's not a great location and there seems to be some impulse interference from something (probably the boiler). It's also a bit too close to the sink for my liking.

Now, I seem to live in a strong signal area, according to Digital UK - and my radio reception is actually surprisingly good (I can get 5 flavours of Bauer dreck over FM, and I can even get Original 106 from Aberdeen pretty clearly with a portable radio). I can't imagine a very high-gain aerial will be needed. Has anyone else had an aerial installed recently? I realise I could just stream everything online, but I can't get internet until the end of next month (for some reason) and I quite like just being able to "put the telly on" and be able to watch things. Should I even just get a dish installed? I heard it might be cheaper.

canadagoose

Bonus question for buzby or anyone else who knows about telecoms: why is my master socket in the bathroom, above the toilet?



The living room / kitchen is right next to it, so why didn't they install it through there? It would make more sense, surely...

surreal

Quote from: canadagoose on April 18, 2018, 08:03:54 PM
Has anyone else had an aerial installed recently? I realise I could just stream everything online, but I can't get internet until the end of next month (for some reason) and I quite like just being able to "put the telly on" and be able to watch things. Should I even just get a dish installed? I heard it might be cheaper.

You're probably looking at at least £150 - I think that is about what I paid a couple of years ago.  Digital aerial will give you FreeView obviously, if you get a dish you should be able to get FreeSat (which I have) - but you may need a separate box for FreeSat as it doesn't seem to be built into many TVs unlike FreeView.  Which you go for may depend on the location and direction, I'm sure the fitter would do a survey anyway.

If you're renting wouldn't you need to check with the landlord?  Is there no communal aerial?

canadagoose

Quote from: surreal on April 20, 2018, 10:59:09 AM
You're probably looking at at least £150 - I think that is about what I paid a couple of years ago.  Digital aerial will give you FreeView obviously, if you get a dish you should be able to get FreeSat (which I have) - but you may need a separate box for FreeSat as it doesn't seem to be built into many TVs unlike FreeView.  Which you go for may depend on the location and direction, I'm sure the fitter would do a survey anyway.

If you're renting wouldn't you need to check with the landlord?  Is there no communal aerial?

£150? Wow. No, there's no communal aerial (it's a Victorian tenement block and I don't think it was ever arranged). Hopefully the landlord will help out... Thanks for the info.

surreal

Mine did come with the dish supplied etc, best thing is to just call a local place and see what kind of numbers you get - it will depend on how much work they have to do to get it situated, how many rooms it's going to, etc

Have a look here: https://www.smartaerials.co.uk/blog/how-much-does-a-tv-aerial-installation-cost

Blumf

Have you not tried an indoor aerial? If you're in a decent reception area it should do the job.

canadagoose

Quote from: surreal on April 20, 2018, 02:54:30 PM
Mine did come with the dish supplied etc, best thing is to just call a local place and see what kind of numbers you get - it will depend on how much work they have to do to get it situated, how many rooms it's going to, etc

Have a look here: https://www.smartaerials.co.uk/blog/how-much-does-a-tv-aerial-installation-cost

Will do this, ta!

Quote from: BlumfHave you not tried an indoor aerial? If you're in a decent reception area it should do the job.
I have - unfortunately it doesn't work brilliantly - there's another flat between me and the Craigkelly transmitter, and sandstone seems to attenuate the signal a fair bit. I can get the BBC stations OK in another position, and ITV, C4, C5 etc in another position, but I have to keep moving the thing about. Not to mention there's some kind of impulse interference from something, which causes annoying blips and glitches.

Sebastian Cobb

How high in the tenement are you? That might have a bearing on price. Is there anything outside you could clamp the aerial to?

Those rooftop aerials are usually shit as the coax goes or the aerial falls off, so it's probably cheaper to mount something to the wall and go in around a window frame.

Are you in a cable area?

canadagoose

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 20, 2018, 04:27:15 PM
How high in the tenement are you? That might have a bearing on price. Is there anything outside you could clamp the aerial to?

Those rooftop aerials are usually shit as the coax goes or the aerial falls off, so it's probably cheaper to mount something to the wall and go in around a window frame.

Are you in a cable area?
I'm on the top (second) floor. The aerial could be installed outside the window, but as I say, the building is in the way of the transmitter so it'd probably be better attached to the roof. Oddly, it's a flat-roofed building, but I don't know if that makes it easier or more difficult.

Sadly, I'm not in a cable area, no - that solved my problem I had two flats ago when the aerial had basically snapped off, but it's not much use this time, unfortunately.

a duncandisorderly

I get a shitty signal in london, because of blocks of flats & so forth, even after paying £200 for a new antenna in a different location on the roof. so I don't watch much 'live' telly. I have decent broadband, though, so iplayer, netflix & the rest are just dandy.

my master socket had to be as close to the road as possible, since the (copper) connection to the green box comes in that side, & the BT guys didn't want to sign off on my guaranteed download speed with a load of internal cabling not of their doing & of unknown provenance. so they test as far as the master socket & you're on your own after that. why yours is in the chanty might be some historical reason like that.

canadagoose

Quote from: a duncandisorderly on April 20, 2018, 05:48:51 PM
I get a shitty signal in london, because of blocks of flats & so forth, even after paying £200 for a new antenna in a different location on the roof. so I don't watch much 'live' telly. I have decent broadband, though, so iplayer, netflix & the rest are just dandy.
You didn't get a working aerial installation for £200? I'd be pissed off if I were you. Did they explain why it didn't work properly? I'm mystified as to why they went ahead with the work...

Quotemy master socket had to be as close to the road as possible, since the (copper) connection to the green box comes in that side, & the BT guys didn't want to sign off on my guaranteed download speed with a load of internal cabling not of their doing & of unknown provenance. so they test as far as the master socket & you're on your own after that. why yours is in the chanty might be some historical reason like that.
Here's the weird thing: both the living room / kitchen and the bathroom are east-facing, onto the road. In fact, so is the bedroom. The socket is in the corner of the bathroom right next to the wall dividing the living room and the bathroom, so why not move it less than a metre north so it's in the living room? In fact, the bedroom is nearer to the green cabinet than the bathroom is, so why not put the socket in there, where there's unlikely to be as much moisture? Seems so odd.

buzby

Quote from: canadagoose on April 20, 2018, 09:16:33 PM
Here's the weird thing: both the living room / kitchen and the bathroom are east-facing, onto the road. In fact, so is the bedroom. The socket is in the corner of the bathroom right next to the wall dividing the living room and the bathroom, so why not move it less than a metre north so it's in the living room? In fact, the bedroom is nearer to the green cabinet than the bathroom is, so why not put the socket in there, where there's unlikely to be as much moisture? Seems so odd.
Does your line come in via an overhead drop wire from a pole, or up he wall from a co-located cabinet?
That's an old NT5B master socket with a blanking front plate that must have been fitted pre-1992 from the logo on it. Presumably the actual socket is in another room (as it's got a blanking plate its basically working as a junction box. I expect the master socket was fitted to replace an old GPO 52A junction box in the same location at some point in the late 80s.

Windowsills and doorframes were always popular locations for junction boxes (especially in stone buildings) as before modern portable hammer drills came into existence drilling through the frame was the easiest way to get the drop cable into the property.

Given the flat is in a tenement, it may be that the room not always a bathroom (a lot of tenements still had outside communal cludgies well into the 70s - our Liverpool council house only got an indoor toilet in 1978(. They may have moved the internal wall between the bathroom and living room to make the bathroom bigger to fir indoor toilets, and when it was remodelled they didn't want to pay BT to move the junction box (the junction box or master socket is the demarcation point, everything back from there is BT''s property)

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: canadagoose on April 20, 2018, 05:35:59 PM
I'm on the top (second) floor. The aerial could be installed outside the window, but as I say, the building is in the way of the transmitter so it'd probably be better attached to the roof. Oddly, it's a flat-roofed building, but I don't know if that makes it easier or more difficult.

Sadly, I'm not in a cable area, no - that solved my problem I had two flats ago when the aerial had basically snapped off, but it's not much use this time, unfortunately.

If you're on the top floor you could probably get away with a loft installation.

You might even be able to do it yourself if you're happy to drill a small hole in the corner of the ceiling, you can always polyfill it when you move out.

buzby

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 20, 2018, 11:13:41 PM
If you're on the top floor you could probably get away with a loft installation.

You might even be able to do it yourself if you're happy to drill a small hole in the corner of the ceiling, you can always polyfill it when you move out.
If it's a flat roofed building it probably hasn't got much of a loft.

Sebastian Cobb

Yeah my mistake for not reading things properly. Kind of rare to get a victorian tenement with a flat roof though.

I miss the granite tenement I used to live in. The steel framed one I live in now shakes when big lorries drive past it.

Hate to think what it's doing to the gas pipes.

Completely unrelated but my reconditioned quad 303/33 turned up today. I'm quite happy.

canadagoose

Quote from: buzby on April 20, 2018, 11:10:57 PM
Does your line come in via an overhead drop wire from a pole, or up he wall from a co-located cabinet?
I think it's the latter; I can't see a pole, and the block across the road looks like it's got what you're describing.

QuoteThat's an old NT5B master socket with a blanking front plate that must have been fitted pre-1992 from the logo on it. Presumably the actual socket is in another room (as it's got a blanking plate its basically working as a junction box. I expect the master socket was fitted to replace an old GPO 52A junction box in the same location at some point in the late 80s.

Windowsills and doorframes were always popular locations for junction boxes (especially in stone buildings) as before modern portable hammer drills came into existence drilling through the frame was the easiest way to get the drop cable into the property.

Given the flat is in a tenement, it may be that the room not always a bathroom (a lot of tenements still had outside communal cludgies well into the 70s - our Liverpool council house only got an indoor toilet in 1978(. They may have moved the internal wall between the bathroom and living room to make the bathroom bigger to fir indoor toilets, and when it was remodelled they didn't want to pay BT to move the junction box (the junction box or master socket is the demarcation point, everything back from there is BT''s property)
I see! Yeah, I'd forgotten that it might not always have been a bathroom. It's actually just got a shower rather than a bath, and I'd be surprised if that had been the case for very long.

Sebastian, sadly, there is no loft, so that's not an option - but fortunately for now, I've managed to find a satisfactory spot for the set-top aerial. It's a bit precarious and points towards an internal wall, but it seems to work fine. Whether it'll always be that way, I'm not sure, but at least it functions.

Viero_Berlotti

Think I paid some cunt £80 to do it a few years ago. He dumped the old broken aerial at the side of the house though.

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: canadagoose on April 20, 2018, 09:16:33 PM
You didn't get a working aerial installation for £200? I'd be pissed off if I were you. Did they explain why it didn't work properly? I'm mystified as to why they went ahead with the work..

when I called them back to complain, the guy gave me an amplifier for free. as an electronics engineer, I was sceptical about this as a fix- it'll just bring up the noise floor, however well tuned it is.  I'm in a dip.... everyone for about 100 yards in every direction has the same problem, & if you manage to get a tall mast put up for your antenna, it blows over inside a year.
streaming everything please, & no dropped packets- that'd be good. :-(

canadagoose

Quote from: a duncandisorderly on April 23, 2018, 09:58:49 AM
when I called them back to complain, the guy gave me an amplifier for free. as an electronics engineer, I was sceptical about this as a fix- it'll just bring up the noise floor, however well tuned it is.
Yep - and a lot of people don't know that! Did he know what you do for a living? He must have a brass neck... I'm not an electronics engineer by any means, but I find it all really interesting. I'm surrounded by electrical engineers at work (not quite the same, but similar), and I like hearing what they get up to.

QuoteI'm in a dip.... everyone for about 100 yards in every direction has the same problem, & if you manage to get a tall mast put up for your antenna, it blows over inside a year.
streaming everything please, & no dropped packets- that'd be good. :-(
Bit of a bugger, that - was a relay mast never installed in your area? (Mind, you get hardly any channels from most of them...)

buzby

Quote from: canadagoose on April 23, 2018, 10:14:20 PM
Bit of a bugger, that - was a relay mast never installed in your area? (Mind, you get hardly any channels from most of them...)
I work in Chorley, about 5 km from Winter Hill, the main transmitter for North West England with most of the muxes operating at 100kW. Reception there is terrible, however, as due to the alignment of the antennae to get maximum signal coverage, there is 'dead zone' of around 10 miles in the shadow immediately beneath the transmitter. It's really weird to see houses literally within walking distance of the transmitter fitted with massive high-gain wideband yagi antennas, and yet where I live 35 miles away you just need a normal antenna.

a duncandisorderly

I used to work on OBs, footy matches, at the tail-end of the 80s. one of my tasks as a vision engineer was to clamber up onto the roof of the truck & rig an aerial for the off-air receiver. what I used to do was take the aerial up with me & scan the surrounding houses, near the ground, to see which way their aerials were pointing.

I was up on the roof of the truck doing this at selhurst park one saturday lunchtime, & was puzzled to see the local aerials all pointing it what seemed like random directions. as I scanned the horizon, I saw the mast at crystal palace. I lay the antenna down on the roof of the truck just any-old-how, & got back off the roof. perfect signal.

about a year later, we were doing a job for champion, with the game going out on a BSB channel. remember them? the unit manager produced a squarial from his car, laughing, saying "it's a satellite- we haven't even got a compass, let alone an inclinometer.... no chance!" & so on.
I took the thing off him & fastened it to the pole on the roof of the truck, then pointed it slightly south of WSW (based on where the sun was setting, nothing more!). we got pictures out of the thing, & with a bit of wiggling, decent pictures.

Sebastian Cobb

^ we've got some Dejero Goboxes at work. Can do outside broadcasts over a load of bonded 3/4g connections with a ruggedized case about half the size of a suitcase. Pair it with a dslr and you can do some fairly mobile and cheap broadcasting.

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on April 24, 2018, 01:43:38 PM
^ we've got some Dejero Goboxes at work. Can do outside broadcasts over a load of bonded 3/4g connections with a ruggedized case about half the size of a suitcase. Pair it with a dslr and you can do some fairly mobile and cheap broadcasting.

I remember someone pitching the bonded 3G things at me when I was at Mtv. they decided they preferred comfy trucks for OBs & for everything else we had signiant & starbucks wifi...

Dex Sawash

Wotsa bonded connection? Some sort of battery of cellular data thingies up linked for bandwidth ?

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: Dex Sawash on April 24, 2018, 06:47:45 PM
Wotsa bonded connection? Some sort of battery of cellular data thingies up linked for bandwidth ?

the system uses several 3G/4G connections together to increase the bandwidth available- it's the only way to get "broadcast quality" video, whatever the fuck that means these days, from a remote location without using an in-orbit object to bounce stuff off.