Hooray for a common sense accurate report on false claims and statements.

Although I didn't fall for AllForOne's digital blurb I did try one of their aerials and it failed to pick up even a radio station. Fortunately it was on a trial basis and I quickly sent it packing.

what causes the break up of the picture, aerial?

Poor signal quality will cause the breakup of the picture, and obviously a decent aerial is an important part of that.

But there is nothing at all that makes an aerial specifically suited for digital TV signals, rather than analogue ones, or for high definition, rather than standard.

Aerials are tuned to a particular part of the frequency band (eg group A, B, and so on), to perform best with the transmission frequencies used in different parts of the country, or can be 'wideband' which means that they have roughly equal performance across the whole of the TV spectrum (but, typically, slightly less than for a grouped aerial, all other things being equal).

When people talk of "digital aerials" they're doing one of two things.

The first is talking out of their hat, for the reason I mentioned in the second paragraph.

The second is using it as a shorthand for a wideband aerial; that's because, in order to fit in the digital signals in some parts of the country, they have had to use frequencies that aren't in the same group as the analogue ones. So, an existing analogue aerial might not pick up the digital frequencies in your area. In that case, you need a wideband aerial for digital, but there's nothing inherently "digital" about the aerial. It's sloppy shorthand.

And that sloppy shorthand gives crooks and chancers the opportunity to take money from the unsuspecting.

The whole idea of digital TV & HD is a big con. I live in North Wales where we can get a signal from Winter Hill & Moel Y Parc. Prior to the closing of the analogue signal I could not distinguish any difference between analogue, digital Freeview or Satellite HD. My set is HD 1080i receiver. This is just another way of government making more money from the retired population who watch TV more than most.

The meaningless "badges, or stickers" have always been around. It's a marketing thing to imply the product has something special needed that an ordinary aerial would not have.

I recall the 'colour TV aerial' being sold. And it's not just aerials of course. When SCART connectors were new you'd see blank faces in the stores when trying to get a TV with this. Yet before long the same stores were selling "satellite-ready" TVs - which just meant they had a SCART! - though some did explain that features such as a 64 channel tuner was needed for all those sat-channels - and there was me thinking you only need one 'channel' extra, labelled SAT, and then only if your sat-box uses the RF instead of the SCART. 'Sat-ready' just meant you could plug a sat-source into it, just as 'HD-ready' now only means you can plug an HD source into it, and does not mean it has an HD-freeview tuner built in - though maybe some buyers may have thought so, but will not wish to admit ignorance later.
Less subtle would be buyers of "Flat Screen" TVs surprised at the size of the delivered box, thinking 'flat' meant 'thin', as in LCD/plasma - because the term “flat as a pancake" was in mind and they only saw the front of it in the advert or on the store shelf as it offloaded the last stocks of CRTs. Not the sort of 'misconception' that is easy to admit to.
Look in your local PC store to see 'Windows7 compatibility' badges on routers and other networking gear. All major operating systems are bound to implement the TCP/IP protocols in their network software if is to work on the internet at all. The kit therefore also has to carry out these protocols but at a different level and does not really care which operating system is behind the network interface. In time buyers learn, but if I ever see such a label on the separate LAN cables I'll know public tech-gullibility has reached a new low.

That "pseudo-science" and "mumbo jumbo" from OneForAll, mentioned in the article, reminded me that their use of 'real-aerial-science' may also be questionable. I've noticed some of their aerials in stores claiming 24db gain as a key feature on the front of the box. This would be an extraordinary high gain for the wideband aerials used for freeview. To many this will give the impression that it's much more powerful than your average 12 or 14 db aerial, causing them to buy the product. I read that with scepticism because such a gain could be unsuitable for many areas as it could overload the TV input and result in a much poorer picture - if this really was so!
In much smaller writing on the side of the box however you see that forward gain is a more believable 12db! I can only conclude that if the rear rejection is also 12db the forward/rear 'ratio' is therefore the 24db - but this is generally not a very meaningful 'gain', and not the figure usually quoted. To quote this figure, with no context, on the front of the box may be commercially effective - but why is it acceptable? As always – buyer beware.

Actually, with regard to SCART sockets and multi-channel tuners, in some cases you did need space for those extra channels on the TV.

In the days of analogue encryption, a SCART socket could be used to decrypt (which is why some sets would have a SCART socket labelled as being for the decoder).

On my old Nokia TV, for example, you could select for specific channels that they be passed through the decoder. The TV would tune into a signal, feed it out of the SCART socket and then display the image received back in from the same socket.

I think - it's a long time ago now - that in fact this would have been more widely used for cable than for satellite, of course, and I don't think there were many - if any - UK services that used external decoder boxes in this way.