[Radio Wrangler]

It's what lies in between that can be the make-or-break issue.

Where I live, some of the houses do not have a clear path to the nearest TV transmitter and therefore use a more distant one, without any problems. Along came channel 5 and their retuners. In these houses they swung the aerials round to the one they'd been told to use in that postcode. No signal. So they sent round an aerial fitter who tore down the perfectly fine antenna in bent pieces and fitted a broadband lower gain one. Still no signal, but with careful adjustment an unwatchable picture was achieved on the 3 higher power channels. They beggered off muttering about sending a specialist. Aye, right.

I sorted a couple of neighbours out. Straightening and welding back together the remains of the antennae which had been literally torn out. Then with the greatest precision, and photographs, I tore out the new antennae exactly as the old ones had been. I tried to get them out in as many pieces. It had been fitted by driving nails through some of the elements into the attic framing.

A quick bit of aiming, being able to see all signal strengths at once on the spectrum analyser, then tune the telly onto a sig gen and I could then do the bit of showmanship of plugging the antenna cable into the telly to have all five channels working with no further twiddling. They had offset the VCR reasonably well, but I provided a few SCART leads and showed people the difference in quality.

All because of someone's over simplification of a coverage area map. And it being blindly followed.

Grrr. One of my neighbours said if the channel 5 people ever came to get their aerial back, she would show him an entirely new way of carrying it back to his van.

David