What sort of £ for aerial installation?

[Dan Turner]

I've just bought a Denon TU-1800DAB and the supplied DAB and FM aerials have got me up and running, but I'd like a proper roof mounted aerial installed to make the most of it.

Does anyone have any idea what sort of dosh I'm looking at to get one supplied and installed? Is it possible to get one arial with feeds for both DAB and FM, or am I looking at 2 separate ones?

Also, what direction does it/they need to face? I'm in Bournemouth and the only practical place to install it/them would be on a south facing wall.

Any thoughts appreciated!

 

[Big Chris]

I paid £140 for an external aerial, supplied and fitted, plus 2 points (1 living room, 1 bedroom).

For direction of installation, if I was doing it myself, I'd have pointed it in the direction that all my neighbours aerials are facing.

I would think 1 aerial would do for both DAB & FM. Much like you use the same aerial for digital or analogue TV.

 

[8009514]

You may need to be a little careful about the choice of aerial if you want DAB and FM. The FM band is 88 - 108MHz, whereas the DAB band is about 175 - 230MHz. So you would need something fairly wideband in order to receive both. Also, you would need to split a single feed in order to provide inputs to the FM and DAB inputs on your equipment. That would drop your received signal level by about 3.5db on each leg. You can though get high gain aerials which would compensate for this.

Have you tried your TV aerial for the DAB reception? The DAB signals are generally transmitted from the the same mast as the TV signals so your aerial is pointing the right direction already. If the TV aerial is wideband enough then you should have no problem using that for DAB. Once again though, you need to split the signal between your TV and tuner.

When I set mine up I used the TV aerial for DAB with no problems at all. For FM I used the supplied aerial that came with the unit (bit of wire with a connector on it). Don't really listen to FM band now, after all the whole point of having DAB is to pick up stations which don't broadcast in FM.

Hope this helps.

 

[chebby]

I paid £190 for an entire new FM and DTV rig + installation about a year ago.

I have not bothered with DAB (on the hifi at least) as internet radio has similar/better bitrates than DAB and thousands of stations.

Many of your questions about aerials and installation can be answered here....

http://www.aerialsandtv.com/

I have found it very useful.

 

[Dan Turner]

Thanks for the replies. I can't use a TV aerial as I don't have one - Sky only in my lounge.

I do want both FM and DAB as FM sounds better (I can tell that even with the supplied aerials) so I'll use that for as long as I can, but I also want DAB for the future and for those channels not available on FM.

Thanks for that link Chebby - that's a really good website, loads of info!

Cheers.