I found what looks to be an old Sky UHF aerial in the garage, so thought I'd use it to see what my reception was like on Prime. It was missing the balun so trotted down to Mastertade and bought RG6 cable and one of those Hills indoor/outdoor coax to ribbon terminal baluns (Product L4465 at Dick Smiths). Now I wasnt 100% sure if this is what I needed, but noticed the VHF aerials they had for sale all had these same baluns loose as part of the pack with the aerial. (No UHF in stock to compare)
What I wasnt sure about, is where the ribbon terminals actually connect to the aerial (This is the dumb question part). So all I tried was inserting the spade type terminals under the two bolts that connected the aerial to the mast.
Unfortunately the picture quality was not great so leaves me undecided whether I could get Freeview HD. Now it could be that the very old aerial is knackered, or that I was missing an important fitting of some sort that the ribbon terminals need to be connected to?? Even though the aerial is a bit old and rusty I suspect it would still do the job.
So short of buying a new UHF aerial on the off-chance it works, is there some other type of Balun I should be trying (maybe a coax to coax rather than ribbon terminal? Is there such a thing. I couldnt see anything else on Hills website that really helped.
I also managed to snap off one of the spade connectors in the process of changing the aerial direction (the bolts were very rusty).
On a side note - RG6 at Mastertrade $1 a metre v $2.89 at DSE and the Balun was $5 v $10