Freeview problem
 

my next door neighbour has an annoying issue with 1 tv and freeviw :(

he has an aerial, (not sure if roof or loft!) the cable goes to a splitter upstairs, goes tv a freeview box, into a vcr via scart, into an old crt tv via rf. all channels fine.

downstairs the lead goes into a panasonic freeview dvd recorder/vcr, connected via scart to an old crt tv. until recently all channels fine, but a little while ago some channels vanished (yesterday, itv 4 i think sand something else), and today, BBC1 and BBC2 picture is excellent, other channels can't be found, ch4 keeps breaking up.

we've retuned several times, have tried a freeview box connected to that tv, same make and model as upstairs one, but not the same physical box, and has same problem as going through the panasonic. tried the freeview straight into back of tv with no improvement.

so I'm a bit confused, that it doesn't seem to be the cabling through the house, as the BBC channels have good quality picture, but ITV ch4 etc don't. But at same time it's odd the upstairs tv is fine.

He is 100% sure that both TVs will definitely be running from same aerial.

I'm going to dig out an old internal aerial I have to see if that makes any difference.

any ideas? thanks in advance

Re: Freeview problem
 

Sometimes with a damaged cable only some of the frequencies are affected. So that could explain why some channel are OK. It could also be an interference problem that only affects some frequencies.

You'll just have to keep experimenting with changing stuff to work out where the fault lies. To avoid recabling I'd probably start by swapping the connections on the splitter to see if the splitter is faulty.

Re: Freeview problem
 

thanks yeh, some-one else suggested swapping which splitter connection goes downstairs, and which upstairs and removing the splitter altogether. Not sure where it is, hopefully it won't be too painful to get to!

Re: Freeview problem
 

d'oh working in IT support, I should know to take everything the customer tells me with a pinch of salt, and not believe them until I've started from the beginning myself :(

so, I go into the loft, there 2 cables, one brown, one white coming from the aerial.

Me: Where do those leads go?
neighbour: the white one down through a hole in the ceiling through the airing cupboard for the spare room tv, the brown down through to ground floor, where there's a splitter for the front room, and back room.
me: err, you said the splitter was by the upstairs tv to go to the downstairs one.

Behind the bookcase in the living room, is an aerial wall socket, lead from that goes to a mains powered booster box, with a splitter in one output. the living room tv he just uses the Virgin box, the lead from the splitter goes through the wall to dining room.

so, he moved the bookcase and found that the lead going into wall was a bit loose, so he pushed it in, I retuned living room tv, and dining room VCR/DVDR and got signal rating 10 and a good picture :)

So, glad we fixed it with something easy, just a shame he hadn't explained/didn't know his setup properly