Cable Forum - The Digital Switchover (Winter Hill, Granada)

Quote:

Originally Posted by iadom (Post 34929786)

I've also got the Welsh BBC1,2 ITV 1 & Welsh C4 at the top of my freeview guide list now.:rolleyes:

BBC1 & 2 North West are down at numbers 801 & 802. They were working fine until another update last night. Now the two BBC North West channels are totally screwed, massive pixcellation.

The annoying thing is I can see the Winter Hill transmitter from my window, looks very pretty at night with all the red lights on it.:)

Thankfully the two V+ boxes are working fine, must be a real PITA for Freeview only peeps round here.

Jim.

This situation is always going to happen in areas with overlapping signals from different regions. I'm beginning to think that in areas like this people will need to change to more directive aerial types. The old aerials are working correctly, but many of these have relatively high sensitivity to the side as well. Also with the old analogue, either and installer would tune in the set, or the auto tune would select the strongest signal. With freeview this is not the case. The auto tune locks onto the first adequate signal it finds tuning up the band from ch 21 -68. If thats not the right region hard luck. This is the case here, with the welsh channels on lower channel numbers than the english.

So really there are 3 options:

1) Get a more directive aerial with a polar diagram that blocks the unwanted welsh channels. More expensive, but a permanent fix.

2) Use the Favourates options on the set to put the channels where you want them. Unfortunately these are usually lost after a re-tune.

3) Do a re-tune with the aerial disconnected. Then manually tune the receiver. Like option 2 a long winded option.

Attenuators have been mentioned, but these of course do not descriminate between the wanted and the unwanted signal. As a lot of the aerials with this problem are low gain types the likely increase is impulse interference & weather degredation dont really make them a viable option. Also the transmitter powers used for freeview post DSO are far weaker than the analogue signals they replace.