Fixing the TV at Mum’s
I spent a while on the roof over the last day or so getting the TV antenna right again. For some reason, the guy who installed the brand new one Mum had put on last winter stuck it on the top of the main chimney, and the heat from the chimney eventually torched the cable and the connector. You’d think a guy who installed television antennas for a living might think to check that sort of stuff, but I guess not.
We turned the TV on one day to find we have zero reception in any of the rooms, so I went up on the roof to have a look and the cable came apart in my hands.
I dug up the old antenna and stuck it over on the edge of the roof using some crap we had laying around, and then pointed the thing as best I could using the reception meter of one of the set top boxes, the compass on my phone, and the locations of the TV broadcast stations in Australia.
Surprisingly enough, because my parents live in a valley, two of the closest and strongest broadcast sites aren’t any use to us. Bendigo’s tower should be fantastic, but unfortunately there’s giant hills in the way of it and the signal just doesn’t seem to come in at all. I managed to get the thing pointed between the hills at the Ballarat site and the reception’s decent when there’s no storms, so that’s good.
I also took the opportunity to re-run the cabling - the splitter and most of the non-brand-new cable my parents were using was absolutely terrible quality. Re-running everything using a decent UHF-capable splitter and everything seems to work much more reliably.
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