Old diplexed wall plate not DAB compatible.
Your website is a goldmine! I finally got around to installing the [Half Wave Dipole] aerial onto my roof this weekend and connected everything up through the below amp. My main problems had been with 2 FM/DAB radios; one upstairs in the opposite corner of the house to the transmitter and one downstairs in the same corner. With the supplied ribbon aerials I could get a handful of FM stations on both of them and only a handful of DAB stations on the upstairs one only (albeit with supposed 99 signal quality). I connected each of the sets to the wall outlets and went for a re-tune. Definitely more FM stations and improved quality but absolutely no DAB. I was puzzled. Did I need to buy a DAB aerial as well and diplex it to Half Wave?
Reading your knowledge pages, particularly the comment from M. Barden about "taking the amplifier out of line", and your excellent article on wall plates, suddenly made me realise I hadn't been applying the same logic that had served me so well in the IT industry for 40-odd years. There followed a series of tests involving lots of cable and spare male/female/F-type connectors until I finally proved that everything was working fine except for the old unscreened diplexed wall plates which seemed to effectively block out DAB. Two of those have now been suitably Derricked and replaced with a female connector whilst I await the arrival of my latest order for 5 new [diplexed : TV + FM/DAB] wall plates (and spacers). I now have superb FM with far more stations and I am back to 99 quality on DAB but now with 134 stations!
Many thanks for the priceless information and education. Regards Phil Davis
Very useful piece of feedback from Phil, not all diplexed surface plates will pass DAB, particularly older ones....

"Amazon Fire Stick" causes interference on Freeview digital picture
I decided to have a go at fitting a loft aerial but as a complete novice I needed some help. Eventually I found ATV and was fascinated by the easily understandable advice and no nonsense help.
So I asked about which aerial I should fit and Justin at ATV gave me all the advice I needed quickly and sent up all the kit I needed to Scotland. Having fitted everything perfectly I found the picture quality to be rubbish, and so i contacted Justin again for more help. After several emails and a lot of head scratching we both more of less decided that I hadn’t done anything wrong. The pixellation and sound drop outs I was getting was typical of a weak signal but I was in a strong signal area. We were about to try fitting attenuators just on the off chance that the problem was a signal that was too strong. Just as Justin was putting them in the post I had another look at the set up. Lurking in one of the TV USB ports was an Amazon Fire TV Stick. I’d nothing to lose, so out it came and the result was a perfect TV picture.
There are two morals to this story. The first is that if you need good advice from a patient and knowledgeable expert that supplies good quality kit reliably then ATV is the place to go.
The second is that if you are fitting an aerial, make sure the only thing connected to your TV is the power lead and the aerial you’re fitting - remove everything else. Then, when you’ve got a perfect reception, plug any other gadgetry in afterwards one thing at a time. This will show how each gadget affects the reception and identify anything that is causing interference.
Hope this helps someone.
Thanks Justin - we got there in the end ! B Smith - Stirling
Very useful bit of feedback which I'm sure will help people, particularly where Brian reminds us to pull everything out (so there is just a known good lead from the aerial to one TV) when trying to diagnose a problem. Also see diagnosing digital signal problems.

Sleeve anchor wouldn't tighten up.
Thanks for listening to my problem with the sleeve anchor this morning, and for giving me the contact details for Rawlplug. You were right, they are very helpful. The chap said it sounded like I had drilled in to a void in the brick (probably not enough mortar in the frog) and it wasn't safe to have 40mm of bolt protruding.
He said if I could get the anchor out I could use a resin anchor, but these take time to set and I wanted to finish the job this morning. Fortunately the advice on your web site to tap the bolt in and remove the anchor with mole grips worked, and I replaced it with an M10 wall plug and M8 stainless screw bolt. I did this for all the other fixings to avoid having the same problem occur again. Job done, many thanks. M Dunstan
Thanks for letting us know the outcome. I had a similar problem when installing sleeve anchors in breeze block (in my garage) which were needed to take a heavy load, bolting a pull down exercise machine bolted to a wall in fact. I kept screwing the nuts up and they never got that tight, in fact there was between 2 and 3cm of screw thread above the nut(s) on all of them ! But bearing in mind I could get to it easily and the consequences of failure wouldn't have been that serious I decided to just leave it and see what happened. Nine months later it was still OK ! I can't help thinking the breeze blocks were a bit soft and that's explanation ?
Generally, for bricks with voids, and for soft blockwork (like breeze blocks) in them I'd strongly recommend the universal wall plugs. In fact unless one is sure there are no voids in the bricks I'd recommend buying a couple of the universal plugs, just in case.....

Hi there. In my lounge I had a cheap plastic aerial splitter (1 male to 2 female) plugged into the TV coax socket on the wall to feed a Panasonic HDTV (with a built in Freeview tuner) and a TVonics PVR (non-HD). My local transmitter (Moel y Parc in north Wales) just moved some channels onto CH39. Prior to this, both the HDTV and the TVonics box worked fine and received all the channels I wanted. However, since the move to CH39, I could only receive the moved channels by not using the splitter. You suggested I should try swapping the splitter for the better quality metal co-ax splitter sell. You sent me one and it did indeed do the trick; I can now get all Freeview channels again on both my TV and PVR so thank you. I don’t know much about electrickery but it would appear that the old cheap & nasty splitter couldn’t cope with whatever frequency CH39 is on. Regards J Gray
An interesting report methinks. We can’t promise that upgrading from a cheap nasty plastic splitter will always have quite such a positive effect but this proves it does sometimes work, a better splitter’s only a few quid anyway so what have you got to lose ?  Actually, it’s worth upgrading anyway because the metal splitters (CoAx and F connector) are physically stronger and, even more importantly, they’re screened.

Hello Mark and Derek. A diplexer is the best way to combine two aerials (it minimises the losses and eliminates any phasing problems etc) but Belmont, being a wideband [then it was, it's now returned to the A group], means that one cannot use a diplexer and still get all the channels. It is possible you could get away with a 2 way splitter in reverse (as a simple combiner), you’d have to have a play to see how well it worked :
1 - Hi Justin, thanks very much for your advice, it was much appreciated. I used the Yagi 18K aligned to Belmont and the SR10B aligned to Kings Lynn {Sandringham}. Fed both cables into loft and at your suggestion I used a 5-2500 MHz splitter in reverse as a combiner and then into my SLX 6 output amp/distributor. I then manually tuned channels 41, 44 and 47 from Kings Lynn followed by channels 30,53,60,33 and 35 from Belmont. All works spot on on my various TVs throughout the house. Tuning was a bit fiddly on some of the older sets,but got there in the end. So thanks again for the help and advice as well as fast delivery of ordered aerials etc. Mark Lawrence

2 - Thought you may be interested in the experiment results as expressed earlier.
Firstly, many thanks for the very prompt supply of the 2 Way Screened W.Proof Ext. M.Head Splitter, ordered by phone yesterday at lunch time, delivered, Royal Mail, this morning, fantastic service especially to N.I..
Directly substituted the splitter for the existing Ch 38 Diplexer, aerials to outputs and feeder to input.
Had already tabulated signal (quality) readings on Humax Free-Sat recorder and a Samsung TV before substition, also used a very basic SLX signal strength meter.
Results:
Signal meter readings remained the same (2 LED's, supposedly 60 dBuV)
RTE channels were down a few percent. (to expectation as new RTE ch. frequencies are still within the diplexer low range and the splitter likely has a greater insertion loss)
UK channels were up approx. 6 percent.
(again to expectation as the new UK ch. frequencies are now outwith the high range of the diplexer)
So a success really, have gained a comparative signal increase on UK channels even with what is now the wrong group aerial and the very slight decrease in RTE channels signal has not caused any issues, looks like the Splitter/Combiner is a viable option for this particular channel combination which is unique (within N.I.) to this area.
Again, many thanks for your help and advice, kind regards, Derek Payne

After the March 2018 frequency changes, we retuned our receiver but found that BBC News HD had vanished. At Crystal Palace, this station had moved from Channel 33 to Channel 55 and our receiver saw a 0% signal on Channel 55. We thought this was because of our old Group A aerial but replacing it with a log-periodic aerial made no difference. What seemed really strange was that Channel 35 had moved to Channel 56 but our receiver could see that perfectly.
Justin at ATV suggested we try to eliminate any dubious aerial wiring in our house. We did this section by section and ended up checking the wiring of the aerial socket plate right behind the receiver. We found the installer had daisy-chained this TV outlet socket onto a second one (i.e. 2 cables going to the back of the wall plate). We were amazed to find that our receiver could see the missing Channel 55 (and BBC News HD) perfectly if connected to the second socket on the wall. As we never use the second socket, we disconnected it from behind the first and were delighted to find our receiver could now see the missing Channel 55 (and BBC News HD) perfectly on the first socket!
The moral is that you just cannot tell what subtle and unexpected problems you may have, or develop, if you engage in dubious wiring practises. Tricky chap Johnny RF!  (J Chittok   London)
A very interesting and useful report. Who knows the cause, possibly that the additional daisy chained outlet may have been generating reflections of the RF signal which happened to be out of phase at the point where the first TV was installed ? Whatever the cause, this is a good example of why daisy chaining RF outlets is a bad idea, though bodgers are notoriously flukey and therefore I’d be the first to admit most people would probably get away with it. That said we have had more than one customer report that their problem cleared when they correctly split the signal at their wall plate

Splitter or amp : you can have too much signal !
1 - I just wanted to say thank you to Angela for her friendly & professional help last week. I was experiencing severe pixelation on certain channels and had phoned to place an order for a complete new system (aerial, brackets, cable, connectors, amp/splitter etc). After discussing the finer details of the problem, as well as environmental factors such as our location relative to the transmitter and aerial placement etc, Angela suggested I try just replacing my existing 6-way amp with a six-way splitter, rather than completely replacing everything as I'd planned. This was on the premise that Crystal Palace output power was significantly increased at switchover and the amp was probably just corrupting the signal.
I must say I'm extremely grateful for Angela's time & advice. I now have 100% quality on all channels on all 5 TVs in the house. Not only that, but it also saved me a considerable sum of money and, I suspect, a lot of frustration that would have ensued had I followed my initial plan.
I've already recommended you to a friend of mine who was also pleased with the service he received - prices & quality were also favourable compared to certain DIY stores 😉 . Many thanks, indeed. Best regards  (A Newland)
An E Mail which make a very important point, see signal strength and amp or splitter ?

2 -I stumbled upon this site whilst 'Googling' for information on how to choose and erect a TV aerial. I found all the information i needed right here and planned my install meticulously. Just to be sure I phoned up and asked for advice (just in case i had missed something) I was advised that even through a 6 way splitter I might not need the mast head amp, and I didn’t. The order I placed arrived quickly and my first install is now complete - I am so glad I did the job myself now as it has saved me a fortune. I have enjoyed trawling through this site immensely - I have particularly enjoyed the nuggets of humour (I’m particularly pleased to read this, it’ll annoy my wife…..) and philosophy scattered around the site and am still clicking on links here to ensure I haven't missed anything. Your site is unique and impressive and deserves credit from its users - when trying a new project of any type I always research thoroughly using the net, I love to save money and don't like being held to ransom by trades (neither do I).
The idea of supplying a securing eye with the kit is brilliant - I am a pussy when it comes to working at heights (I don’t blame you, being careful when working at height is not Health & Safety Bollocks) and my double ladders were not really fit for the job but [when using the eye screw] were rock solid and gave me the confidence I needed - if you had of seen me working off the second from top rung of the ladder whilst clinging to the bracket and trying to secure the pole to it you would have not have been proud... but at least I wasn't wearing a hard hat and a fluorescent vest.
Thanks again guys, I will be ordering again soon as i need a TV aerial at my house in Boston too. P Beardsworth   (Boston)

3 - When I asked for your advice a couple of weeks ago you could of told me and sold me anything. You did not. Before ripping all the coax out of all the rooms I thought I would first try quality cons and a four way splitter with F cons. I phoned my order on friday 4.30pm and was told I would receive it early the following week. Cool. Got up saturday morning and there it was. Postman must of wet bed as he usually comes around 1pm. Now lets not forget this is Jan and the country is covered in snow you must be related to that fat bearded bloke in the red outfit, anyway thanks for the advice, all TV's are working fine. We can all get back to ignoring each other. ATV you are tops and your site is informative and so funny.  C Ingham.

Hi Justin, greetings from the sunny Borders. Thanks for the stamps - a kind gesture.
First: the FM half-wave dipole setup is giving excellent reception on both FM and DAB, where the built-in aerials on the radio sets were giving lousy performance. Money well spent, and all the info anyone could want on your excellent website.
This might amuse you: I've been helping my son move into a new (quite old actually) house. The TV wouldn't work. In the course of trying to figure out what was wrong I bought a new coax extension cable - the only thing I could get at short notice was a cheapo 4m cable from Argos.
To cut a long story short, the cable connection from the aerial was knackered, but we got full TV reception from just the cable by itself, not connected to anything ! Add that to your list of improbable aerial setups. Thanks again for excellent service. Regards B Farish
It’s not unknown to get a signal with just the cable (i.e. no aerials at all), though it’s fairly rare and you do obviously need to live in a pretty strong signal area ! An interesting sidelight is that crappy cable is actually more likely to pick up a signal than decent cable because cheapo cable hasn’t got as much shielding. I can remember doing a set up at a house where the guy wanted his Freeview box tuning in but he only had an old A group aerial. Because at that time Crosspool had MUX1 on CH63 so I warned him he wouldn’t get the BBC channels because that MUX would be out of band. Imagine my surprise when I tuned his box in and all the BBC stuff was there, rock steady, no breakup ! He lived in a strong signal area and MUX 1 on Crosspool had just increased its output from 100W to 1kW. I’m fairly sure he was actually picking the signal up from his crappy old low loss CoAx and not through his aerial at all.

Thanks for the quick delivery of the 3 TV Fly leads. These quality leads gave a massive improvement over the "other" cables I was using. Old ones were from amazon as an add-on, and are a complete waste of time and money. I’m a little bit wiser thanks to your website, and my tv reception is vastly improved due to your fly leads' thanks;)     P Murphy  (Oxford)
People really do underestimate the importance of fly leads, cheapo ones really are a poor investment. They may often work, but in significant numbers of installs they’re a contributory factor to the problem or even the whole of the problem. And, let’s face it, a decent fly lead is only £4, possibly only £2 or £3 more than a budget special……..

I bought three fly leads (custom flyleads in this case) off ATV in an attempt to reduce or remove HDMI RF interference between my PVR and the TV. Before the changes I couldn’t get much reception on most channels at 1080p and lost Freeview HD and some SD channels on TV when the HDMI was carrying 1080i. If I unplugged the HDMI the channels disappeared.
Changing the crappy fly lead from the wallplate to the mast head amplifier PSU resulted in some HD returning at 1080i but not at 1080p.
Upgrading the cheapo lead between the mast head PSU and the PVR made no difference,
The lead between the PVR and the TV was replaced with one of yours and like magic, all the channels were then available, even when HDMI was connected at 1080p.
What I don’t understand is why cheapo HDMI leads seem to cause less interference than high psec one, are they operating at a different frequency??? (M Blow    Crewe)
I must confess I don’t know much about HDMI and all that, I’ve still got a CRT TV (as at 2016, and still by 2019.....) and am quite happy with it ! But I feel certain this customer report will be of use to many people, so thanks ! If anyone knows the answer to the question at the end please get in touch and we’ll put it on here

As you’ve given such good advice in the past I thought I’d share a resolution to a problem I’ve recently solved in case you wanted to share it on your website
I have a Band A and a Band K aerial combined using a masthead diplexer (all supplied by you) – this was to receive BBC4 from Crystal Palace which the mux is on CH55, well outside the standard Band A range. This goes to a distribution amp and feeds a Humax Youview box.
All has been great until recently channels on the CH55 mux kept complaining intermittently of no-signal even though the signal strength was 90%+. It turned out it’s interference from the HDMI cable. 1080p I believe is 708MHz and CH55 is 745MHz which was close enough to interfere. So even though all muxes were 90-100% strength the quality was all over the place on CH55
I could have bought a decent HDMI cable but I tried setting the Humax box to 720p which completely solved the problem (my TV is a 12 year old Toshiba which is only HD Ready, not full HD) – obviously the HDMI cable was no longer radiating interference (at least at a frequency that affected me)
I couldn’t see any reference to this on your site but assume it must be a reasonably common problem with channels around this frequency. Maybe this will help someone else with similar issues. Kind regards (P Tomlinson -  Herts)

Quality lead and wall plate v cheapo specials
Just to say thank you again for the prompt service form ATV. With the help of your excellent and informative website, and the stuff I ordered from you, I have now wired up the downstairs extension for sound and vision.
When the new aerial was fitted last year I asked the install guys (CAI)  [Ohhh. Ohhh.......  I should add here - in best "Have I Got News For You" fashion - alledgedly.........]  for a screened coax face plate (like you sell) but they just fitted a cheap and nasty one, probably because there wasn’t enough depth in the existing pattress (they should have used a spacer plate......). Anyway the signal quality seemed OK so I didn’t really care that much. However every now and then there would be picture break up etc, which I didn’t want with a new aerial. I then replaced the Poundland shop aerial leads with ones from ATV and that seemed to make a difference. The picture still broke up but not as often. My next step, whilst adding DAB points, was to use decent face plates. So I ran some new cabling under the floor and when the installation guys came back to join up the cabling outside I asked them to replace their faceplate with an ATV one and use the spacer which I had bought for the purpose. It could be the cheapo faceplate wasn’t wired up very well (I thought they were professionals ! ) but I now get both better DAB and TV with the screened face plate even though it is split.
I was surprised at how much difference replacing the faceplate made. From the figures I could have split the TV signal at least one more time !
(I have summarised Dave’s results into the adjoining table)
I think the lesson here is that using decent cable, decent splitters and proper face plates makes a big difference.  (Dave Jones   Enfield)

Bypassing a cheap crappy wall plate
Thanks for the discretionary refund and for one of the most quirky and humorous websites I have found in a long time... Got the loft kit through, someone enjoyed packing that more than I did unwrapping it ! I must admit I am going to use the loft kit for an outside install but it's only for a DAB dipole; honestly! (well, to be fair, there isn’t much windloading on a DAB dipole). Just another word of thanks. My son has rarely managed to get many channels on the TV in his flat where it's connected to a loft aerial (he's not allowed an external one - I don't think he's even supposed to go in the loft...). Anyway, I removed the 1m fly lead from the wall plate to the TV (~99p with plastic plugs) unscrewed the wallplate and took out its innards. Pulled through some cable (there was just enough) and put a new co-ax plug on the lead. It looks a little less elegant (brown cable) but he can now get all the digital channels. Best regards Ian Royston
We’ve had a few E Mails from people saying the’ve had significant improvements by taking out crappy budget wall plates. Using a decent screened non isolated wall plate is an alternative to bypassing a budget surface plate.

Using Google Earth to line up an aerial
Thank you for the prompt shipping of the aerial and fixings I ordered. I installed it the next day and we now can receive all the digital Muxes from Winter Hill despite us living in a ditch where everything else is pointing at the local relay on Dog Hill. I thought you might be interested in the method I used to determine the exact direction to Winter Hill from my house. Which is a big help to limit the amount of wafting the aerial left and right once up the ladder, while someone else is watching the signal strength indicator on the STB. Use Google Earth to open up a image that includes the transmitter location and the location where you are trying to receive it from. Using the "ruler tool" of Google earth draw a line between the transmitter to the receiving area.(rough locations are ok at first). Then zoom in on the transmitter and using the ruler tool again move that end of the line to spot   on the transmitter. Then zoom in on the receiving end and using the ruler tool put that end  of the line spot on where the aerial is to be mounted. You now have a picture, that you can save and print, of the exact direction to the transmitter. Also the Google ruler tool tells you the exact distance between receiver and transmitter. As a last bonus feature, If, as in my case, there is high ground close by between my house and the main transmitter you can  put the cursor on the house and Google earth shows its elevation above sea level, (add height of house and pole) then moving the cursor along the line you can locate the highest point and it's elevation between the receiver and the transmitter. Drawing a new line  between my house and the high point, gives the distance, from all this and a bit of trigonometry, give or take a wavelength or few, you can calculate a good idea how much   the aerial needs to be angled upwards to pick up the signal coming over the hill.            Best regards, Patrick Holdaway (Shaw / Manchester)
Also see “Patrick’s Pictures” of a bodged Bacofoil aerial.

Beware of DAB+, is your radio capable of receiving it ?
Hi, just got my FM dipole aerial and associated bits and bobs delivered. The co-ax is excellent quality, exactly as described on your website.
However . . . One reason for replacing the bit of wire dangling out of my Sony dab stereo was to get a large number of dab stations that show up on the scan but I didn't actually receive. I had assumed the digital signal was weak - Strong enough for the receiver to detect, but not enough to actually play the signal. Installing the new dipole has not helped. I now realise this is because the "missing" stations are DAB+, and my stereo is a bit old and only gets plain old DAB.
I'm happy with the aerial, and FM reception is improved a lot. I'm wondering though if you might add a bit to your otherwise excellent and comprehensive website warning customers that if they have a DAB receiver, there's nothing they can do to get DAB+ stations short of replacing the receiver.
Many thanks for all the info on your website - I would happily pay a bit more for good quality equipment from someone who tells it like it is! G Smith (Lanarkshire)
And a jolly useful piece of feedback this is, hopefully it'll save a few people a bit of time and aggravation....
I have to say I have found DAB radios less reliable than FM or AM. I cannot remember ever having an analogue radio fail, but I've had two DAB radios break down.
If your DAB radio stops working there are a couple of things to try :
1 - Unplug it from the mains, wait a few minutes, then plug it in again, or if it's a battery radio remove the batteries then replace them (I am taking it as read that you have already checked if the batteries are the cause of the issue....)
2 - If the radio suddenly stops picking up DAB stations (or, for FM/DAB radios, its FM "text service") move the radio to somewhere where the signal is known to be stronger and see if it works there. If it does you may find when it is replaced in its original site it will work.