I have never had a TV before in one of my vans but with the new van we are getting I have decided to put one in. This then led me to think of how much a pain it can be to setup the aerial as you don't know what direction the TV tower is or whether it is Vertical or Horizontal polarity.

I thought that there must be a better way.

First of all I thought of designing a website where you can put your location in and it would plot all the surrounding TV towers on a Google Map. Here is the beta version if you want to have a look: TV reception.

The negatives of this is that you always need an internet connection which I don't always have when camping. So then I had an even better idea. Why not create TV tower POI for my GPS and then that will be easily able to tell me the direction and distance to the TV towers.

I did this and it works a treat. The (H) stands Horizontal and the (V) for Vertical signal. Here is a screenshot of my Garmin 1490T displaying the TV towers:

If you are interested in downloading the TV tower POI here they are in a zip file (Garmin is the .gpx, Navman the .csv and Tom Tom the .ov2 file):

• Garmin, Navman and Tom Tom TV Tower POI

Any questions/comments can be directed to the relevant Feedback thread: http://forum.ozcamps.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=145

Cheers

Brett Kinross