Freecom DVB-T USB Stick

I've been using a Freecom DVB-T USB stick for several years with XP, Vista, and more recently Windows 7 - it has worked fine on all occasions. Used in combination with Media Centre, it's great after the drivers have been installed correctly. I've been impressed the most by the small aerial which has actually provided a better signal than our new roof mounted aerial.

Overall, 9/10.

The Freecom DVB-T USB Stick is poor. The small pin gets disconnected after a year of use.. So no point of buying it. Overall, a very poor performance

Great picture and easy to use on outdoor aerial - plug it in and see.

BUT, I think the mobile aerial is rubbish and will not work in this region

A very useful product. Some people will be disappointed with the signal pick-up from the supplied aerial (a small rod). It is true that you need to be in an area of high signal strength to succeed with that aerial. My camping aerial is a £10 one from "Roys of Wroxham". It fits in a box about 35cm square by 10cm deep.

Firstly, the Freecom DVB-T USB stick being Vista compatible is a complete farce, you're likely to do more harm than good if you take this product fresh out of the box and install it on a PC running Windows Vista. Add onto that you're lucky to get ANY signal from the aerial provided (I picked up a grand total of zero channels, whereas my freeview box gets them all). Even with an actual indoors aerial I got zilch. A completely pointless product, it's going back for a refund as it serves no purpose whatsoever.

The DVB aerial is very good, it takes approx 10 minutes to search for the channels and then you can store them for viewing just like tv, it comes with a remote which is a little fiddly until you get used to it. You can pause live tv and then carry on watching when you want (up to 1 hour anyway). The aerial is not too bad, i am close to a transmitter but the signal still gets lost occasionally. You can record TV and store it on your hard drive, you can also burn the programme onto a dvd and watch later.

I have tried two of these wretched things on several different computers and got absolutely nowhere.

With the supplied internal aerial I have never managed to even successfully complete a channel scan let alone watch anything. If connected to a roof mounted aerial, the unit will complete a scan and list a number of channels but not a complete list of Freeview channels. Having selected a channel you sometimes get a picture and sometimes not, but I have never seen any Teletext.

It crashes all the time, is very fussy about which USB port it is plugged into and is generally unsatisfactory. The ideal of being able to watch TV on your laptop is a good one but don't expect to be doing so with this thing.

I bought the Freecom Digital TV USB Stick Freeview Receiver from the Amazon website, where I found it was offered for the best price. I can now watch and record TV from my PC in a room where there is no aerial socket. I appreciate that many people have had problems with receiving channels, but it seems to me that this product works perfectly well provided you can receive Freeview channels. I am very happy with it.

The Freecom DVB-T USB Stick may or may not be any good, and as I never got it working I will never know. All I can tell you is their support is rubbish, with national telephone rates, numerous calls to get past the recorded message, and up to 48 hours to get an RMA number to return items for repair. As I only had it a day, I sent it back to the supplier for a refund. Because of this I would not at the moment purchase any other Freecom products either. Bad support can ruin an otherwise good product, in my opinion.

It took three attempts to get most of the channels to load on my Freecom Digital TV USB Stick Freeview Receiver. At first attempt, only half worked OK, then at the second attempt a couple more were accessible, but after trying for the third time it became quite obvious that not all channels were available with this receiver box. I did try moving the antennae and the processor, but to no avail. Channel 4 and 5 proved to be elusive, so I had no choice but to send it back to Amazon who gracefully refunded the cost of the item and the postage costs.