My Dad is in Wellington, and advised me by phone last week that he's looking for a Decoder Box to get HD TV signals via his aerial. He is over 80 years of age and although once very adept with electronics, his aptitude has slipped in recent years and he has trouble learning how to use devices.

I wanted to seek some opinions about what might be a good model Decoder Box for him. I was thinking of something with a built in hard disk, as currently he's recording to video tape - which wont really do justice in terms of quality to reproducing HD quality on his 1080 TV.

Im in Australia, and have gathered what information I was able to, but please forgive me if I have misunderstood how it works in NZ as I havent lived there for over 20 years and am not up to speed on things.

He has two antenna - a standard VHF/UHF.. and a satellite dish

As I understand it the Satellite dish is for analogue, and he wishes to use the antenna for HDTV via a decoder box.

It seems that at present he gets some channels through each (?) via "free to air" and "freeview" (My understanding is that one of these will soon be obsolete?)

Ok, so hopefully that makes sense.

So in terms of a decoder box, does he look for one to connect to both antennas? - or just to the aerial?

Will he be able to get all channels through the decoder box?

Lastly, he needs a very easy-to-use unit with a hard disk. Can anyone recommend a suitable model?