Aerial installation fun

I can write this now. It's taken far longer than I thought it would, but I've finally got digital television in every room of the house. After two weekends worth of leaping about in my loft (thanks Dad), drilling, cabling, connecting, disconnecting, swearing, exchanging, and fiddling, it's all working. Having my wife run up the stairs to excitedly proclaim that "there's no interference when I use the microwave" (curse those wireless video-senders) makes it all worthwhile!

My main problem was the damned Philex SLxM (or SLx4M or somesuch) masthead amp I bought from Maplin. To cut a long story short, the third one works Attempt one provided us with an amp but no instructions (there's some special jumper voodoo required to get the thing working), attempt two yielded a faulty box (as we eventually found out, after much fiddling of jumpers), but attempt 3 rewarded us with a crispy digital picture in every room.

Lessons learned:

• Never say "we should be done in 5/15/24/30 minutes/hours".
• Never say "this bit should be easy".
• You need the braided copper bit around the outside of the coaxial cable (this is a source of genuine hilarity among those "in the know" isn't it Ashleigh/Mark?).
• Ethernet cable = better than wireless.
• You can connect an extension lead (with a us-UK adaptor on the end) into your ADSL microfilter and have it work.
• The correct jumper configuration is every open except the powered output and the input

So, in answer to the question I asked myself before I started this whole job, "yes, it can be done". I'm 22 miles away from my digital transmitter, with clear line of sight, and a Triax Unix 52 aerial in my loft gives me a damn fine digital picture.