TV (and a post without pictures, too)

It's been an irritation that we've been able to watch UK television via a satellite dish, but we can't get any French channels at all, as they are broadcast from a different satellite. We didn't want a second dish: one was bad enough.

But there is also terrestrial digital TV here, just like in the UK, and all that needs is an aerial.

The electrician had put the wires in place - a coax cable running up to the cramped attic space by the chimney - but we'd not had an aerial installed. I thought I'd see whether an aerial in the attic would work. Would the signal get through the thick lauze roof, two layers of hardwood planking, and 40cm of glassfibre? The answer is, yes it would.

One puzzle was that the wall outlets by the TV are fed by only a single coax cable to the three outlets (satellite, TV, and radio). I discovered that there are little filters that will combine the satellite and terrestrial signal at one end of the cable, and separate them at the other. There was one pre-installed in the wall outlet, so I only needed to add in the coupler in the inlet box.

The aerial is now hanging in the attic in a sort of cats cradle of wire. It doesn't need to be fixed rigidly as it won't be affected by wind up there. And it seems that the direction it points isn't too critical, as I got a good signal first time without having to tinker with it.

So we now have a couple of dozen French TV channels. We've been told that watching a bit of French TV should help us pick up all those colloquialisms that we didn't learn at school. Well, we'll see.