James – Page 8 – Sennicotts House & Gardens

September 1, 2009 No Comments

Surely the time has come to dispense with the TV aerial stuck on the highest point of the roof?

This question has been raised because,

We want the TV location to be flexible and at least in more rooms.
We want to be able to watch the TV on the PC/Mac
If we want to enhance the authenticty of a historic house the TV aerial doesn’t look right and let’s face it they are ugly.
Reception for some of the multiple digital channels of Freeview are poor in our area.

In an ideal world I would like to send the TV signal down the Cat5 network cables because they are already routed through the house. So the signal would go over the network to the computers and down the spare Cat5 cable direct to the TV. Although I’m sure this must be possible because the Cat5 cable must have many of the same properties as coaxial aerial cable I also know only a small amount of Cat5 cable capacity is usually used and there is probably even spare capacity to send both network and TV signals down the same cable.

Anyway back to the aerial. What I really want to do is lose it from the top of the house. The answer seems to be to find a descreet place to hide a Satellite Dish BUT I have only recently invested in TV’s that accept Freeview and therefore not Freesat.

So what I really want to do is:

Find a way of installing a Satellite Dish,
Taking a cable from this to a box that can then send out a full spectrum of channels down a Cat5 (ideal) or coaxial cable to the TV.
I would then like to take a similar feed from this ‘box’ to the computer to share the signal over the network.

So that is my solution working with the existing technology as I see it. The problem of course is that we have the Internet and now with BBC iPlayer, 4oD, ITV Player and Demand 5 we can watch so much TV over this medium. The quality is good and we can even stream TV channels live. So if I were to investigate the whole Satellite Dish option would I find in 5 years time this is all obsolete?

Will we be able to watch all our TV over the internet and will it still be called ‘TV’ anymore?

Having a go.

August 27, 2009 2 Comments

After many months, maybe even years deliberating, whether to set up a website for Sennicotts and whether to keep a blog, this week I just did it. Without much thought, and when I should have been doing something else, I paid up for 2 years hosting and we were off.

If you are reading this then I ought to confess this is a steep and intentional learning curve. So what I post today is unlikely to be in the same form as content I post in the future. I expect the approach and purpose to evolve.

Five years ago I was mulling over how it is so fashionable/cool to not be seen trying. I sometimes wonder if this was the main thing I learnt at school. We had just had our first child and as I started to think about the values we as a family would try to nurture I couldn’t help but feel we could look back at the end of our days with a degree of satisfaction and even acclompishment if we had lived by the motto ‘Try Hard and Try Again’. I even asked a friend who was a Latin and classics teacher what this would be in Latin. The answer:

‘Multum temptate tum temptate rursum’

So this is what I will do here: try to make this content informative, interesting, entertaining if possible, and if I don’t succeed at first I will try again!

Update 10 years later (September 2019)…

How do you lose your TV aerial?

Having a go.