RCA Male Plug to PAL Female Socket Adaptor | TV Aerial to RCA Phono

Product Overview

This is the small rigid adaptor that lets a television aerial lead plug into an RCA socket. One end is an RCA plug — the familiar phono connector with a centre pin inside a split collar — and the other is a PAL socket, the hollow slotted barrel used on Australian television aerial leads and wall plates. Push the plug on the end of your antenna cable into the socket end, and the RCA end goes into the equipment.

The job it does most often is connecting an antenna to a piece of audio equipment. Plenty of FM and DAB tuners, hi-fi receivers, older video recorders and AV components take their aerial on an RCA jack rather than the standard TV aerial socket, while every antenna lead sold in Australia ends in a PAL plug. This adaptor bridges those two without cutting or re-terminating anything. The same part is used for composite video where a coax run finishes in a PAL plug and the display, capture card or recorder offers an RCA input.

The PAL end is a socket, not a plug. It is the hollow barrel with the slot down the side, and it receives the male plug on the end of your aerial lead. The RCA end is a plug, with the centre pin standing proud, and it goes into a socket on the equipment. If you hold your aerial lead in one hand and look at the last connector on it, this adaptor is the right one when that connector is a PAL plug and the thing you are trying to reach has an RCA socket.

Please check you want this gender. Several adaptors in this family look almost identical in a photograph and only one of them will do any given job. This listing is RCA MALE to PAL FEMALE. If what you actually need is the opposite — a PAL plug to go into a wall aerial socket, with an RCA socket to accept a phono lead — then search for “PAL plug to RCA socket” instead, because that is a different part and this one will not do it. An all-socket version also exists, for joining two plugs together, and that is different again. Reading the two ends off the photographs above is the quickest check: the barrel you can see into is the PAL socket, and the end with the small pin sticking out is the RCA plug.

One honest limitation. Nearly every competing listing for this adaptor advertises “75Ω”. Our supplier does not specify an impedance for it, so we are not going to print a number we cannot stand behind. For television, antenna, tuner and general AV work the distinction makes no practical difference at these frequencies and this adaptor is exactly the right tool. If you are doing laboratory or instrumentation work where a specified impedance genuinely matters, buy an adaptor that is sold with a stated figure — that is the right call and we would rather tell you than sell you the wrong thing.