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I know not everyone here is a fan of tellies in caravans, but for some of those that are the following might be helpful.

Our van came with this 19" Samsung TV fastened to the side of the wardrobe

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and since it was all plumbed in to an external aerial/satellite socket, it seemed a bit daft not to use it when we were rained off or bored with playing snap.

Like a lot of televisions a few years old, this one has an HDMI connection and will display a High Definition picture (aka HD ready), but the built-in Freeview tuner won't provide it. I'm a total convert to HD - the picture quality is in a different league to the old standard definition effort, so it was a bit irksome that I couldn't get an HD picture on this telly without faffing around with the little satellite dish I bought.

Cheap.

Off Ebay.

It works really well, but like lots of the portable 'camping' satellite setups, the user interface menu and programme guide are irritatingly over-complicated and decidedly European.

While it seemed a bit like over-egging the pudding (and meaning yet another gadget to take), getting a Freeview HD box and connecting it to the TV with an HDMI lead was effectively the only uncomplicated way of being able to watch HD using an aerial.

A little bit of rummaging around on the Internet of Things showed that there are plenty of HD set-top boxes around, but lots of them are quite big and heavy and not particularly cheap. This is partly a consequence of them being able to record. We don't need that. If there's something dead good on telly while we're away we'll record it at home and watch it when we get back.

What I wanted was a small, light and inexpensive HD box with a simple programme guide. A small, light and inexpensive HD box you can simply turn on, wait a couple of minutes while it does an automatic channel search to pick up everything available wherever you are, and sit down and watch.

As it happens, TalkTalk give just such a thing away as part of new customer broadband and TV sign-ups.

Werbung: A thing like this.

They're ten a penny on Ebay because lots of the people who take up TalkTalk's broadband offer already have Sky telly, so they don't need it. I got a brand new one, boxed and completely unused for eight quid. YouView is just Freeview by another name.

I tried it on the telly at home first. I stuck the Avtex aerial I'd bought (cheap, off Ebay) onto the inside of lounge window, plugged in its booster adaptor, connected the TalkTalk box to the telly with the HDMI cable that came with the box, turned it on, put the kettle on while it did its automatic channel search and bingo! A full selection of everything available - both HD and standard definition - on Freeview.

Replicating that set-up in the caravan is equally straightforward. The TalkTalk box lives on top of the wardrobe and connects to the TV with a similar HDMI cable. The Avtex aerial sticks on the outside somewhere reasonably close to and plugs into the external aerial socket above the nearside wheel.

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The telly, box and aerial booster adaptor plug into 230v sockets inside the wardrobe, and Robert's your mother's brother.


There is one other thing - while this TalkTalk box won't record, it will let you pause and rewind half an hour's worth of TV. If you were desperate to have a box that did record, TalkTalk's super-duper broadband and TV package does a giveaway of one of those too.

And there are plenty of them going cheap.

On Ebay.


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I forgot to say something.

If you didn't have a television in your caravan and wanted one, there is a much cheaper alternative to spending hundreds of pounds on Avtex kit, good though it undoubtedly is.

An HD monitor with built-in speakers like this one will do the job more than adequately.

Eighty-odd quid for the screen and fifteen quid or so for an HD Freeview box (including HDMI cable and adaptor) as above and you're away. Admittedly it won't play DVDs, but then it's only a third of the cost of an Avtex telly...

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Quote: Taffy wrote in post #3

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Pepe not only wanting a tv but now not connect unless you have HD -

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