2013 Symbol external aerial point.

When I plug the site aerial into the external socket it makes no difference to reception so I need to bring the aeriel into the van and connect directly into the TV. what am i missing?

On ours I discovered that if you switch off / unplug the TV aerial amplifier it works ok.

webfoot wrote:When I plug the site aerial into the external socket it makes no difference to reception so I need to bring the aeriel  into the van and connect directly into the TV. what am i missing?

Nothing. 

Loads of them are like that. I did receive a technical explanation from and ex TV engineer, but he may as well have been speaking in Swahili!!

PaulMold uses a short length of flat co-axial cable for going through the window and says it works well. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

(I'm not sure if this is the right sort, but there are loads on eBay.)

I do indeed use a similar flat coax connector but that's because I don't have an external connector. If I did, I would expect it to work.

Does the external connection need "patching" inside the van somewhere?  What is normally connected to the TV?

Hi Webfoot , this keeps coming up and A/s in their infinite wisdom/ lunacy cross the cabling when building the van  ie the tv in from outside goes to the sat out inside the van and the sat in from outside goes to the tv out. I have traced the cabling in my Kemerton using tone generator and found it so. On calling A/s , Mark at the time said that yes this was not unknown and when I asked WHY do they do this he could offer no explanation! Apart from that whoever wired the coax in my van did not have a clue how to terminate coax cables ie the core was shorted to the screen at every termination with stray screen strands of wire - POOR QUALITY.
     Try connecting an aerial to the tv in outside and connect your tv using a flylead from the sat position in the av panel if you have one, it may just be that yours is the same as a lot of other vans. Worth a try if nothing else! I ended up reterminating all connections in the van and some are hidden behind panels as every connection was short cct as above. Now works well on both external aerial and external sat dish .Hope this helps as the external socket is supposed to do away with leaving windows open and leading cables through windows! Having worked in communications for over 38 years and terminated literally tens of thousands of coax cables I know my way around one!

It might be also worth checking the cabling inside the van,  I discovered that they’d screwed through the coax feed from the aerial when they’d put the cover over the cabling. Removed the screw, replaced the run of coax and our aerial now works.

Our Symbol also has the external coax input (for site aerials) wired to the satellite screw-in internal connection point. I have fitted an adaptor that screws into this. The adaptor converts it to a female coax connector. The TV aerial wire is connected to this instead of the normal coax socket and does work.
My impression from Mark was that the configuration was intended but I cannot recall his reasoning.
Martin

Current A/S wiring diagrams in their panel van conversion handbooks indicate external  coax to internal coax, so clearly some earlier vans were wired differently and perhaps incorrectly.
Martin

marbarsymbol wrote:Our Symbol also has the external coax input (for site aerials) wired to the satellite screw-in internal connection point. I have fitted an adaptor that screws into this. The adaptor converts it to a female coax connector. The TV aerial wire is connected to this instead of the normal coax socket and does work.
My impression from Mark was that the configuration was intended but I cannot recall his reasoning.
Martin

I can confirm what Martin has said.

Our Symbol had just the one external input connection for an on site aerial lead (whereas our Warwick has two inputs) I also used an adaptor on the internal sat connection and connected the coax to that. I found that this then works OK when on site.

Hubert