Setting up a television is usually one of the easier tasks to complete when moving into a new property. To get a satisfactory signal here took me about over a week, excursions to five shops, and the expenditure of about £25. Could this have been solved more cheaply and quickly?Upon moving into my new flat I could not find a standard television aerial socket in the wall. We certainly have an aerial on the roof, but I don't have access to the exterior of the property to follow where the cable enters the building. Near where the television is located we have a male F connector, an interface with which I was unfamiliar, but Google indicates that it may be used for terrestrial television signals. I therefore set about connecting my television to this odd plug.
With some effort and a few different hardware stores I obtained an F connector to aerial plug adapter (£2), so I could make the connection, but the resultant signal wasn't great. The usual cheap first option to improve the signal coming out of a wall is to try a powered signal booster. After obtaining such a device (£10) and an F connector to aerial socket adapter (£2) I found that it actually made the signal much worse, which is an unusual outcome. It appeared to be amplifying an incorrect or non-existent signal. Therefore, the socket in the wall was not for terrestrial television. Whoops!
In the course of this fiddling I noticed that the signal was almost good enough when it was not plugged in to the wall's F connector. After a bit of Googling I determined that we are only a few miles from the television transmitter, and so a small indoor aerial should be sufficient. I purchased one (£11), and after piping it through my previously purchased signal amplifier I get an excellent signal. Result!
I don't know where the aerial on the roof feeds in to, and I don't know what signal comes out of the mysterious F connector near the television. Both of these are mysteries that are beyond the ken of man.