All posts by Shaun
Below are all of Shaun's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Oh, I would have thought the loft aerial was fine. We had a loft mounted one for years at the old house and that gave us 100% perfect reception until Emley Moor's extensive engineering works last year (at which point we had to move it outside). The new one is very large and was professionally installed. The installer said his signal meter showed a "perfect" signal, and that did seem to be the case for the first couple of weeks. It doesn't seem to be the old cable to our lounge as at the same time he installed a completely new cable from the aerial to an upstairs bedroom. When MUX1 is playing up then both TVs suffer. We live in a very flat rural area and there is only one other house nearby so there are no obvious obstructions.
Signal strength/quality does seem to vary by the day. For example, as I mentioned in my post last night it was terrible yesterday evening yet this morning my wife is watching BBC1 on our Freeview TV and it's perfect. The reason that is more surprising is that we normally use a Freeview PVR rather than the TV itself and if there's any disruption the TV always has a much poorer signal (the digibox can often cope with it - although not last night). Is it possible there is any engineering work going on that isn't publicised?
| link to this comment |
<embarassed update> It turns out that my wife was watching the analogue BBC1 channel on the TV this morning. She'd tried the digibox already before I got up and the signal was still poor (although not quite as bad as last night apparently) and she wanted to watch "The Wedding" on BBC so analogue was her only option at the moment.
| link to this comment |
Re. KJM's suggestion of checking analogue BBC2 (C51), I've just done that - it is quite poor on my TV, a bit ghosty and snowy. BBC1 (C44) is the best and is comparable to Channel 4 (C41). ITV (C47) is not as good as BBC1+C4, but not as bad as BBC2. Channel Five (C37) is also very good. Does that give any further clues? Freeview BBC1 is very bad as I'm writing this but unlike Majory my Mux C channels (well, just tried Dave and DaveJaVu) are okay at the moment. Hadn't tried them for a few weeks.
| link to this comment |
I'm still getting poor reception on Mux 1 on most days now. It seems to be getting worse and was particularly bad during the day this weekend with no signal at all, and in the evening it was barely watchable but with multiple glitches per minute. Anyway... I noticed the other day that if I zoom in the reception map to where I live then there seems to be a small blank square right over my house! However, these blank squares are very regular in their positioning. Is this just due to a quirk in the way the site maps the expected signal quality or are there really that many regularly spaced areas where the signal is very poor? As an example (NOT my own postcode) look at the map for LS25 2JQ. Click the "+" button 5 times, then you'll see a map with four blank squares (the top right being over "Sturton Grange" and bottom left close to "Little Preston"). If you scroll the map up, down or right these blocks continue to appear with regularity. Can anyone explain? Am I just doomed because I live inside one of those tiny blank squares even though the land is flat for miles around?
| link to this comment |
Thanks Briantist but I've already checked that page. I don't have any devices other than the digibox connected directly to the TV. As mentioned before, the engineer fitted a new aerial when we moved into the house at the beginning of April and it was perfect for about 2 weeks. The aerial hasn't moved, the connections are all okay. Two TVs feed off the same aerial and they both have issues on Mux 1. Can you shed any light on my query about the reception maps - are those little regularly spaced blank patches just an artefact of the way the data is interpreted, or are they real (e.g. due to some sort of interference patterns related to the transmission)? Thanks.
| link to this comment |
Betamax_man: The coax to the upstairs TV was fitted brand-new from Aerial to wallplate when the aerial was replaced so I'd assumed that meant it was a signal issue.
Briantist: Thanks for info on little blocks. At least I know I don't happen to live somewhere that it is impossible to get a good signal.
I'm going to get a good quality aerial amplifier and install it between the aerial and cables leading to the two TVs and see if that helps.
| link to this comment |
Dave Mell: A team of scaffolders were working at my house today. They are all from the Sheffield area. My wife was moaning about our recent Tv reception issues and several of them also said they'd had problems for the last couple of weeks too. Looking at the Emley Moor map above it appears to cover most of Sheffield. It does seem a bit of a coincidence that many of us are now having reception problems that all started around the same time. Is it not possible there has been a small but unpublicised reduction in power output such that those of us in some areas now suffer problems whereas those of you with 'perfect' systems just haven't noticed the slight difference? Does anyone have any equipment that measures signal level & quality who has kept records for the last couple of months? Or does signal strength/quality vary so much by the hour due to weather/atmosphere that it wouldn't show anything useful?
| link to this comment |
KevinH: Our BBC channels are currently prefect too. Lets hope they stay that way.
| link to this comment |
Brian, looking back at this he thread, did the BBC's original response ever get published? "Steve at BBC" suggested that their response explained the reason for the redactions?
| link to this comment |
Page 1
Thursday 28 April 2011 11:31PM
I have exactly the same issues as Majory and also receiving from Emley Moor. I am approx 10 miles south-west of York. We moved into the house at the end of March and had the internal loft aerial replaced with a new one as the previous owners had used Sky and the old aerial was no good for Freeview. Everything was then perfect until around the middle of last week (or possibly even a little before that on some days?) and then all of the Mux 1 channels started playing up intermittently. Sometimes it has frequent pixellation, sometimes the channel is just unwatchable/blank. It was unwatchable around 7:30pm to 8pm this evening (Thursday) and has just got very bad again now around 11:15pm hence prompting me to post this. Seems a bit of a coincidence?