Saturday 24th January 2009DIY Success

When we bought our house it had 4 RF connectors in the living room. One was connected to the UHF Aerial on the roof, and one was connected through to the master bedroom.

The other two weren't used, but when we got Sky Digital installed, one was easily connected to the new satellite dish.

But the RF connection through to the bedroom wasn't as useful as it may sound. The length of the cable to the bedroom combined with the length from the lounge connector to and from the TV/Sky made for quite a crappy signal. Only TV3 was really watchable, and that only if you liked static.

So I wanted to upgrade, and given recent technology changes, thought an HDMI connection would be the trick. But I stumbled upon the one issue I have always had with doing this sort of thing: How to get the cables for the connection down the wall to the TV.

A couple of weeks ago I was inadvertantly given the answer by a person at our house to quote a few jobs, this being one of them. Solution: Run the cable through the eves, down a conduit on the wall outside the house, and then straight in through the wall.

So a couple of masonry drill bits later, I upgraded the house by adding an HDMI connection from the lounge through to the bedroom. I found that the most common way to extend HDMI long distance is over CAT5e/6 cable, using a balun to convert the signal. Wired NZ has a really nice wallplate that has HDMI on the outside, and connects to 2 CAT6 cables on the other side.

I got a large box of CAT6, and replaced the RF connector in the bedroom with the HDMI wallplate and 2x standard RJ45 network ports (for future use). I intend to "properly" wire RJ45 jacks into more of the house once I can be bothered.

The end result is fantastic, with full 1080p now in the bedroom with no noticable issues in the  sound or picture. I can recommend this solution to anyone looking to do something similar, with only one caveat: Get up early, and do any work needed in the roof space before the temperature reaches 40 degrees C.