It's always been a dream of mine to have TV in the car, however, since we bought our car after the digital switchover (2009/10 I think) I've never had the luxury.

Fast forward to last week and the DVD player in our car kicked the bucket, looking on the internet a replacement Jaguar unit was £150... ouch!

And so it began, we decided instead to purchase a freeview box from the internet, it cost us £50, well under the cost of a new DVD player.



First things first was to make sure the concept worked, so touching the power connections to the battery and:-



It worked! The box was able to pick up channels, albeit not many, but what can you expect?




So then it was time to put it in properly! Installation took a day's work, involved removing the rear seats and parcel shelf. Threading one antenna to the front of the car and one on the back window, also positioning the remote eye in the cabin and connecting everything to power.
This particular box also has support for USB sticks, so I decided to route the USB port into the cabin, so a quick trip to Maplin to get an adaptor, then I threaded it into the center armrest along with the RCA cables to connect the box to the TVs.



Since we were replacing our DVD player we decided to mount the box where the DVD player used to be, and I used an old radio and took all of the circuitry out of it and used it to mount the box, it does a good job of blocking the hole there:-



And thus, we were finished and we were able to get BBC One on the TV!



All in, we paid £50 for the freeview box and £8 for the adaptor to get the USB port into te cabin.

It's definitely nice to see live TV returned to the car and even when there isn't live TV we can store hundreds of hours of video on a USB stick!

 

Great, just saw your post on facebook earlier !

 

Alas we, in the US, are not so lucky. Our ATSC modulation standard (8VSB) is quite sensitive to Doppler effect which makes it challenging to receive TV when the car is in motion.

 

Ah, I'm not too familiar with TV in the US

When the cars in motion, the TV works, albeit sometimes the signal drops out and there is the problem of jumping from one tv transmitter to another requires the box to be retuned.