Home > Consumer Reviews > Freecom Digital TV DVB-T USB Stick Freeview receiver, black

I got the item today. quite easy and trouble free installation initially. (You need to have DirectX 9 installed in the system). Connected initially to the roof top antenna and the software auto scanned most of the channels. I was initially able to hear sound, but not picture. The picture window was showing lines and dots only. Thinking in terms of incompatibility with my display adapter, I tried to change some settings. I reduced my laptop display colour depth from 32 bit to 16 bit and also disabled the display adapter hardware acceleration (my laptop has S3 prosavage). Voila! I was able to see all channels clear. Next thing was even surprising. I tried various positions for the antenna supplied in the kit inside my room. On the wall positioned horizontally and perpendicular, it was picking up all the channels. My area has good freeview reception.
I don't agree to all the negative points in some of the reviews.
1. It is a good piece of kit, you may face some sort of hardware or software incompatibility depending on your PC spec.
2. If you are in a poor freeview reception area, you may not get any channels or you may need a roof top antenna.
3. The small antenna is working,but definitely needs some tweaking with regards to its final position. I did not get any better using an amplified indoor antenna.
4. The software shows the RF signal strength and quality. Both has to be high for reception.
5. You get either full quality picture or none. If reception is poor, you may see intermittent scenes and sound and not poor quality pictures.
6. Video recording is much smooth and not heavily CPU dependent. It is directly in mpeg2 format and has nearly DVD quality.
Hope this helps.

Easy to set up and install. Neat and impressive for the money. There is a problem with the serial number which you need to set up the software but a trip to the FREECOM website's FAQs gave me the solution.

BUT, and this is a big but, it does require an external aerial if used indoors. I live in a good signal area (South London) and the supplied aerial was useless. I plugged into my roof top aerial and it worked really well. Cracking picture and sound.

Is this for you, only if in an incredibly good signal area.

After some initial scepticism as a result of other reviews, I thought the £30 price tag on this product was worth the gamble and ordered one. Within 10 minutes of receiving it, the software was installed on my laptop and I was receiving every channel perfectly from the aerial that was supplied with the product.

However, when I took my laptop to my girlfriend's house - the supplied aerial picked up precisely 0 stations (although I could get them all using her roof mounted aerial).

This product will not work if you wanted to use it as a means of watching TV on your laptop while on the move (i.e. on the train). However, if like me you want to use it as a means of recording television at a high quality (I use it mostly to record Channel 5's baseball which is on at another time due to the time difference in America) it is excellent and well deserves 5 stars. The only issue is whether the supplied aerial will pick up the channels you want or whether you will have to use a roof-mounted aerial - this however, will purely be a gamble on the signal strength in your location.

I was struck by how many people have written reviews for this product, and how many have read those reviews, judging by the amount of feedback left. Perhaps this reflects a perenial optimism that things will work out okay if you prod and tweak them, plus it's a cool looking gadget. Well that's me to a tee - sucker for cute widgets plus I did what I guess most people did and think 'oh those ones who couldn't get it to work very well, they were probably just unlucky'. Thirty quid didn't seem like very much money when it would almost certainly work for me, me being reasonably techy-savvy.

Well. As seems to be standard, the initial scan with the supplied aerial produced nothing, but forewarned I plugged it in to the house aerial, and the scan produced a list of about thirty channels. Note, I had to stand in front of my tv set to do this, where there is, er.. not a great need for another tv, but I digress.
I initially struggled to reorder the channels in the set up box, but with a little perseverance I did. Then I tried them out.
BBC1 & BBC2 & CBBC fine
Sky Sports News & Sky 3 fine
E4 fine
Shopping channels
that's it

Now there are many more channels listed, many of them called things like '302', but I have no idea what these are. Click on them and Nothing happens. Can't find ITV or C4 at all.

The Quality of the picture and sound is really good, no complaints there, but to be honest I wouldn't have bought it if I'd known I'd be able to get two channels I want at the price of having an extension cable resting on the head of the people watching the real telly in the living room.
If I want to record something on BBC1 or 2 I'll probably be very pleased.

Other comments: the remote has to be very close to the usb stick to work; the stick heats up to the point where I wouldn't want it touching anything else or to be left plugged in while I wasn't in the room as I suspect it could be a hazard if forgotten; the software is not intuitive to use and exhibits selective behaviour, where sporadically only parts of it will function (not a lack of resources as pc is quite powerful). It isn't impossible but it doesn't make the job easy.

So should you buy it? Well you might be one of the lucky ones - some people obviously do fine judging from many of the reviews -
but I think you have to be realistic, it's just a straight gamble..

Have to say that thirty quid seems like quite a lot now!

First impressions: looks pretty well made, a usb extension lead is supplied which has been invaluable.

As many other reviewers have commented, a rooftop aerial is extremely handy but utterly against one main purpose of this device which is portability.
Fortunately I am using this on my desktop pc, and my aerial is magnetised to my clothing rack, which helps a lot!

If you are going to attempt to use the supplied aerial, it's going to take a lot of time to position it correctly and it still might not work.

Software supplied is NOT very good. Some of it is counter-intuitive and I could probably have designed a better interface myself. The recording is glitchy, the EPG is really poorly designed. That being said, I've had a few recording successes already and the quality of the recording has been excellent, but it eats hard drive space, a large HDD is essential.
I'm hoping that Freecom will bring out some improved software soon!

The picture is good on all channels, although in the three days that I've had it, I've had to reposition the aerial several times to avoid intermittent tranmission.

Overall, a potentially fantastic product, which is let down by sub-standard software, but well worth the money.