John Lewis JLPA02 Amplified Indoor Aerial

...trepidation that I went to John Lewis and was once again bombarded with a selection of indoor aerials, all promising to give me the strongest, cleanest digital TV signal I’d ever seen. I made my choice – the JLPA02 - which was about £25 at the time. Taking it home and plugging everything in, the TV went on. A quick scan with the freeview receiver gave me all of the digital channels except those on the BBC 1 & E4 multiplex, a definite improvement. ...
...and changed the position of the aerial to see where I generally received the best signal. Having settled on a position, I rescanned the freeview box and had the missing channels, with signal at around 50%. This, however, was soon to change.

When I woke up the following morning, digital reception was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that the aerial must have moved, I repositioned what I had previously considered the pinnacle of all indoor ... more

My history with indoor based television aerials is not good. Images of trying to hold the aerial perfectly still with one hand, the remote in the other and tuning the freeview receiver all at the same time inevitably spring to mind. Living roughly twenty miles away from the transmitter, the unamplified aerial resurrected from the back of a cupboard gave me extremely grainy picture on terrestrial and only 1 multiplex of channels on digital. For those of you who don’t know, digital TV is broadcast in blocks of channels, called multiplexes. You either get all of the channels in a particular block, or none at all.

It was therefore with some trepidation that I went to John Lewis and was once again bombarded with a selection of indoor aerials, all promising to give me the strongest, cleanest digital TV signal I’d ever seen. I made my choice – the JLPA02 - which was about £25 at the time. Taking it home and plugging everything in, the TV went on. A quick scan with the freeview receiver gave me all of the digital channels except those on the BBC 1 & E4 multiplex, a definite improvement. I then switched over to analogue TV, just channels 1-4, and changed the position of the aerial to see where I generally received the best signal. Having settled on a position, I rescanned the freeview box and had the missing channels, with signal at around 50%. This, however, was soon to change.

When I woke up the following morning, digital reception was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that the aerial must have moved, I repositioned what I had previously considered the pinnacle of all indoor aerials, and still got nothing. After about an hour of this, I had around half of the available freeview channels, which is still a vast improvement on my original aerial but nevertheless frustrating.

The main part of the aerial, into which the coax cable fits, is made of a relatively thin plastic. This makes the device very light, and therefore very blu-tack friendly, but does make the unit feel cheap. As this was one of the more expensive aerials available at the time, I was a little disappointed. That said, the aerial will undoubtedly survive the occasional crash to the floor, or the time when you’ve had just about enough of that terrible picture in your spare bedroom and decide to take it out on the aerial. The top section of the aerial has the standard, highly bendable adjustable antennas which can be moved to fine tune the picture quality. Once in place the unit feels very secure, and there’s a reasonable amount of weight to it as a whole, but is no more sturdy than similar aerials I’ve used. Also in the box comes the mains adapter for the built in amplifier.

The aerial itself is sensibly designed and doesn’t look too ugly on top of the TV or table top. The glossy black plastic at the front is a nice addition, but the gain controller feels flimsy and poorly made. This shouldn’t be much of a problem however, as it’s the one thing on this aerial that needs hardly any adjusting after the initial set up. All in all, the JLPA02 offers a sensibly constructed aerial with all of the usual settings, which seems to perform slightly above the rest. With any indoor aerial reception is going to be a problem, and this one is no exception.
 

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