Freeview Digital Aerials for Satellite Dishes

Freeview Aerials

Aerials for freeview digital boxes are often called freeview aerials. But a freeview aerial in the trade does not exist. It’s called a freeview aerial, as you normally need an aerial upgrade for your freeview box or freeview television. The nearest aerial to a freeview aerial would be a wideband aerial. If we carry on calling a wideband aerial a freeview aerial, it would be easier for you to understand what we are talking about. A freeview wideband aerial works by picking up the digital muxes from the terrestrial transmitter.

We don’t use frequencies but channels. The channels for freeview start from channel 21 and go all the way up to 68, depending on your transmitter for digital signals. The channels for our local digital transmitter are 42, 45, 53, 57, 60 and 63. Within these muxes, sorry I forgot what to say muxes are. They are the sort nickname for digital multiplexes. These are like envelopes of television channels. Say on mux 42, you could have all the BBC channels on it, then mux 63 could have all the ITV channels on it. Mux 53 could have all the radio channels on it.

The biggest problem with old aerials is that they were banded to the local analog transmitter. You would have a type A aerial that would work between the channels of 21 to 37, or a type B aerial that would work between the channels of 35 to 53. Then, there was the type CD that works between the channels 48 to 68. As you can see, the banded aerial, lets say type A, would not be any good for freeview, as the digital channels in my area start from 42 and go all the way up to channel 63. The freeview box would work, but the channels would not be picked by the banded aerial. As you can see, this is why we use wideband aerials, as the channel range would fall into the channels the wideband aerial can pick up.

The next thing you would have to consider, regarding freeview aerial or wideband aerials, is the gain of the aerial. There are normally three different wideband freeview aerials. They are standard freeview aerial, high gain freeview aerial and super high gain aerial. The way that these aerials work is the further you are from a digital transmitter, the higher gain freeview wideband aerial you will need to use. You can end up with too much signal, so you would use a standard low gain freeview aerial.