JJ Lighting & Electrical - Home Electrical Centre

Short answer – probably not. This is perhaps the biggest frustration with digital, it is EXTREMELY difficult to make it work with an indoor aerial, even if you’ve had an older analogue set working off of one.

The reason is that digital is a very different type of signal to analogue. With an older analogue set, only a fairly weak signal was needed to get a watchable picture. Digital on the other hand, requires a much stronger signal – typically 85% – to work properly. Even worse, a digital signal doesn’t deteriorate if the signal is weak, there is no graininess or ghosting, it just simply does NOT work at all. In some cases you may be lucky – if you live at the top of a hill for example – but even then, the picture may break up in heavy rain or when a car drives past.

So what can you do about it? Sadly there’s no easy option. Many retailers will sell you a very expensive boosted aerial, but 99% of the time these make little or no difference, so we’re not fans of that option. We stock a good quality indoor aerial for about £8, and we suggest that if you can’t get a good signal from that then it doesn’t matter how expensive an indoor aerial you get. Being honest, the only proper long-term solution is to have a connection to your main aerial run through to the new set, or possibly a whole new aerial just for it. It may be frustrating and an expense you hadn’t bargained for, but it’s the only sure way…