The Quest for the Best Picture of them All

I've, kind of, bought this, well, er, big LCD screen. It works a treat on the Media PC that I, er, kind of bought, at Christmas. I've also, er, kind of, bought this digital TV tuner for the Media PC which means that I can get rid of the nasty, noisy analogue TV signal (which actually gives the best picture) and replace it with the graphical certainty of computer data.

Except that I can't get digital ITV. Our TV aerial, although very good for birds to sit on (one of them sat on it when we had the gas fire on to get toasty warm, fell asleep from the fumes and woke up right behind the fireplace with an awfull headache. What fun that was - but I digress) is no good for actually pulling in the signal. Especially digital TV.

So number one son and I toddled off to buy a wide band aluminium extrusion with a large number of elements. We got this thing home, assembled it and fitted it in the loft. Before I went to the trouble of threading the wire all through the nastiness which is our loft I directly wired it up to make sure it worked, which it did. So it was out with the cordless drill and into the deepest recesses of the eaves to get the wires into place. And of course once I'd done this it didn't work. Life is unfair sometimes. And so it was out again to get a booster amplifier to get the signal up to a level which actually works. Most of the time. Unless the wind is in the wrong position and the trees have leaves on them. Such is the price of being a pioneer.