Television

TV on the road

I am looking at this for a van. It is all 12volt.

If you camp near a town or in a town then in most cases reception should be good. We have a 10" AWA TV/DVD player and we record shows etc at home and watch them when there is no reception. You can also in this case buy a few cheap movies for when there is nil reception. However as I have previously said most towns even the small ones have some sort of tv .
Remember that the good old Radio is a great instrument for checking the weather and news.

If your TV card is digital - and I suspect it is, then you can only expect to get good reception when in close proximity to cities and most larger regional towns. If your card is analogue then you can probably expect to receive over a longer distance. As an example, recently I was testing a HD Digital card in my laptop, I was on high ground just east of Penrith. I could not receive any of the mainstream channels. The signals were just too low. Antennae I was using was a twin telescopic unit between 3 - 4 ft in length. Trouble with digital is that if you aren't getting sufficiently high strength signal then no picture. Analogue will produce an acceptable picture on an inferior signal. Satellite may be your best choice. You can expect to get ABC, SBS and in the east, Ch 7 central QLD. When correctly set up, picture will be perfect. You might be better off getting a SW Radio Receiver. DSE have them for about $69.00 Link

G'day Axel,

"ts one thing to get away from it all but another thing to not watch the ABC news to keep informed of whats happening in outside world"

why the need for pictures? ABC/Radio National does the job just fine I would have thought. Haven't you learnt this by now?

or will you miss Rosyln and Juanita? :)

We just bought a new laptop and the dealer gave us a digital tv receiver that plugs into a usb port and you attach your tv antenae to it....picks up the signals quite o.k. but of course there are still lots of places where there is no digital broadcasts or very little ....so I bought a digital/analogue receiver on ebay for $61 del. , apparently a vcr can be attached to it as well to record onto the computer and then on to dvd/cd if so needed....cheers

For anyone interested, we recently bought a Teac 19inch lcd tv for the caravan. Its seems to be the only one available that has digital and anologue tuners and operates on 12 v and 240v. Also has a built in DVD player. We have used it with an Explorer C3 ?? antenna in Laurieton (near Port Macquarie). It was great. Paid around $720 if I recall correctly.

Regards

Chris