[gamingdave]

I have recently moved, and was planning on having either Sky or Virgin installed. Unfortunately Sky is a no-no and 4 weeks after moving, Virgin still seem incapable of getting the wayleave (legal) and new accounts departments to talk together. So it looks like I am just going to stick with Freeview.

Currently feeding straight into the TV, a Panasonic 32LXD70, but will probably end up getting a HTPC and using a tuner card/s.

The problem I have is we have no aerial socket in the lounge, there is one in the bedroom, but this gives an awful signal anyway. I am currently using an indoor aerial, routed through a powered signal booster, which manages, most of the time, to get a handfull of freeview channels (thee beeb and dave) but not ITV, C4, 5 and a load of others.

Last night I took the aerial into our small outdoor space off the lounge, on an extension cable. Our outside space is south facing, and Crystal Palace is due south. I simply plonked the aerial on a plant pot pointing to CP. Checked signal strength and it had rocketed. Did a retune, and it picked up nearly all the channels, including those previously missing.

Watched a few hours on various channels and most ran without any glitching. So there is definate potential here

The outside space is well sheltered from wind, but there is a very large tree at the end (maybe 15m away) and then a big house behind.

My questions are (sorry its taken so long to get there):

1) would a proper outdoor aerial (even though it could only be mounted low down as we are a ground floor flat, and I have no roof access) be likely to give a better signal. I know this is a random one, but have to ask anyway.

2) is it safe to run the indoor aerial outside? I assume it is, as there is no current passing through it, but would moisture cause an issue in the cables?

3) is it likely that a tuner card in an HTPC will require a stronger or weaker signal to provide a stable picture than the TVs built in tuner?

I have had a hunt arround, and checked on wolfbane but it doesnt meen much to me (postcode is N5).

Any help greatly appreciated.

[Stephen Neal]

If you are using a PC and can't get a brilliant off-air signal - have a look at diversity receivers.

I have a Hauppauge Nova-DT Stick / Elgato Diversity (the same hardware)

This is a dual-tuner external USB 2.0 DVB-T stick - BUT you can operate it as a single diversity tuner rather than as two tuners if you chsoe. This allows you to connect two internal aerials (splitting a single aerial feed is pointless in this mode) to the two tuners separately, and it will combine the resulting two error-filled signals and deliver a single stream with far fewer errors.

If you can't get a decent internal aerial solution - then two not-great aerials with diversity tuning might be an answer?

I've had good results with it in hotels in Europe just using the two stubby internal aerials that come with it (3" whips). As we switch from 2k to 8k in the UK we should also see some improvements in robustness as well.