Full Freeview on the BlaenPlwyf (Ceredigion, Wales) transmitter
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The symbol shows the location of the BlaenPlwyf (Ceredigion, Wales) transmitter which serves 17,000 homes. The bright green areas shown where the signal from this transmitter is strong, dark green areas are poorer signals. Those parts shown in yellow may have interference on the same frequency from other masts.
Are there any planned engineering works or unexpected transmitter faults on the BlaenPlwyf (Ceredigion, Wales) mast?
Blaenplwyf transmitter - Blaenplwyf transmitter: Possible effect on TV reception week commencing 04/11/2024 Screen may go black on some or all channels 
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Digital television services are broadcast on a multiplexes (or Mux) where many stations occupy a single broadcast frequency, as shown below.
64QAM 8K 3/4 27.1Mb/s DVB-T MPEG2
H/V: aerial position (horizontal or vertical)
The BlaenPlwyf (Ceredigion, Wales) mast is a public service broadcasting (PSB) transmitter, it does not provide these commercial (COM) channels: .
If you want to watch these channels, your aerial must point to one of the 80 Full service Freeview transmitters. For more information see the will there ever be more services on the Freeview Light transmitters? page.
Which Freeview channels does the BlaenPlwyf transmitter broadcast?
If you have any kind of Freeview fault, follow this Freeview reset procedure first.Digital television services are broadcast on a multiplexes (or Mux) where many stations occupy a single broadcast frequency, as shown below.
64QAM 8K 3/4 27.1Mb/s DVB-T MPEG2
H/V: aerial position (horizontal or vertical)
The BlaenPlwyf (Ceredigion, Wales) mast is a public service broadcasting (PSB) transmitter, it does not provide these commercial (COM) channels: .
If you want to watch these channels, your aerial must point to one of the 80 Full service Freeview transmitters. For more information see the will there ever be more services on the Freeview Light transmitters? page.
Which BBC and ITV regional news can I watch from the BlaenPlwyf transmitter?
BBC Wales Today 1.2m homes 4.7%
from Cardiff CF5 2YQ, 113km south-southeast (149°)
to BBC Wales region - 206 masts.
ITV Cymru Wales 1.2m homes 4.7%
from Cardiff CF5 6XJ, 115km south-southeast (151°)
to ITV Wales region - 206 masts.
How will the BlaenPlwyf (Ceredigion, Wales) transmission frequencies change over time?
| 1950s-80s | 1984-97 | 1997-98 | 1998-2010 | 2010-13 | 31 Oct 2018 | ||||
| VHF | A K T | W T | W T | A K T | A K T | ||||
| C3 | BBCtvwaves | ||||||||
| C21 | C4waves | C4waves | C4waves | +BBCB | BBCB | ||||
| C22 | +ArqA | ArqA | |||||||
| C24 | ITVwaves | ITVwaves | ITVwaves | D3+4 | D3+4 | ||||
| C25 | SDN | SDN | |||||||
| C27 | BBC2waves | BBC2waves | BBC2waves | BBCA | BBCA | ||||
| C28 | ArqB | ArqB | |||||||
| C31 | BBC1waves | BBC1waves | BBC1waves | ||||||
| C56tv_off | C5waves | C5waves |
tv_off Being removed from Freeview (for 5G use) after November 2020 / June 2022 - more
Table shows multiplexes names see this article;
green background for transmission frequencies
Notes: + and - denote 166kHz offset; aerial group are shown as A B C/D E K W T
waves denotes analogue; digital switchover was 10 Feb 10 and 10 Mar 10.
How do the old analogue and currrent digital signal levels compare?
| Analogue 1-4 | 100kW | |
| BBCA, D3+4, BBCB | (-4dB) 40kW | |
| SDN, ARQA, ARQB | (-10dB) 10kW | |
| Analogue 5 | (-14dB) 4kW | |
| Mux 1*, Mux 2*, Mux A*, Mux B* | (-17dB) 2kW | |
| Mux C*, Mux D* | (-20dB) 1000W |
Which companies have run the Channel 3 services in the Blaenplwyf transmitter area
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Is the transmitter output the same in all directions?
Radiation patterns withheldFriday, 22 March 2013
D
Dave Bradney12:19 PM
Aberystwyth
Further to previous (21.3.13), Channel 24 output of Blaenplwyf was back at 20.30pm on Thursday 21 March (yesterday), with signal strength 60%, but today at 12 noon strength had returned to 28% and no pictures were available. At least now I have realised that doing a rescan is a bad idea! I suggest this transmitter has a current problem, even if it is not a current *reported* problem. Comments??
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Dave's: mapD's Freeview map terrainD's terrain plot wavesD's frequency data D's Freeview Detailed Coverage
D
Dave Bradney12:21 PM
Aberystwyth
Sorry I meant Channel 27 not 24 in above
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Dave's: mapD's Freeview map terrainD's terrain plot wavesD's frequency data D's Freeview Detailed Coverage
Monday, 25 March 2013
D
Dave Bradney4:15 PM
Aberystwyth
In answer to your q, aerial is on top of my small TV set, ie it's the one that came with the set - I live close to the mast and in direct line of sight, reception has never been a prob before last Thursday
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Dave's: mapD's Freeview map terrainD's terrain plot wavesD's frequency data D's Freeview Detailed Coverage
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Howell Edwards: Can you please provide your postcode so we can see what your reception should be like? Thanks.
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Saturday, 10 August 2013
P
pam wilkins7:20 PM
Port Talbot
Howell Edwards: i have a Humax box and seem to keep loosing signal,went off this afternoon ,still off now, the same happened last saturday and it did not come back until 21.00 sunday,i am sa13 postcode area is there any works being done affecting my signal.
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pam's: mapP's Freeview map terrainP's terrain plot wavesP's frequency data P's Freeview Detailed Coverage
P
pam wilkins7:21 PM
Port Talbot
p.s there is some work being done on pylons in the local area is this whats affecting me.
| link to this comment |
pam's: mapP's Freeview map terrainP's terrain plot wavesP's frequency data P's Freeview Detailed Coverage
Monday, 19 August 2013
M
MikeB6:51 PM
Howell Edwards: I dont think your being fair to Freeview, and its certainly not fair to compare reception from a terrestial transmitter with Sky, for example.
Freeview has to deal with a mixture of geography and physics, and there are areas where neither ensures a good signal. The change in channels has also exposed possible downsides to current setups in terms of peoples aerials and systems, and in fact if you actually look through the questions, many will problems will be as a result of too good a signal!
Freeview is the de facto standard for the bulk of people (its in every TV), and most people already have an aerial, and of course its much more flexible than sat. systems in many ways. It is a pain to have to retune at the moment, but the vast majority of people a good signal the vast majority of the time. Put it this way - Waltham serves some 600,000 homes. If it works for 99% of them (which is a very high success rate), that is still 6000 homes with a problem.
Remember that the people who have a problem on this site are a subset of the viewing public as a whole, and a pretty small one at that. If you consider that many problems with reception have far more to do with inside the house than outside it, you can see that it is not far to blame Freeview for all problems.
Sky and other systems dont have a problem with geography, as long as the dish can 'see' the satellite - but even the Astra satellite is (I belive) not one but several - so even they require some backup.
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MikeP
8:54 PM
8:54 PM
Whilst largely agreeing with MikeB, there are some issues. Analogue terrestrial, as we had before 'Digital switchover' had been carefully planned for a 4 service channel allocation with the aim of covering over 97% of homes with 51 main transmitters and over 1000 'relay' transmitters, some of very low erp (effective radiated power output)- the smallest I know of being just 0.4W erp. DTV appears to many not to have been fully thought through and that seems to be the causal factor in so many retunes being required and it seems the 'average viewer' does not understand why. The main instigator seems, to me at least, to be Ofcom in not planning far enough ahead and allowing themselves to be, arguably, overly influenced by commercial considerations for services completely unconnected with television services, namely the needs of 4G operators.
There is also the issue of not understanding the vagaries of transmitting UHF signals - irrespective of the modulation methods nor the signal encoding systems. DTV is merely a UHF transmission using digital encoding with a form of quadrature modulation (often 64 QAM or higher) and is therefore subjected to the same transmission problems that UHF analogue TV had but with different unwanted side effects, no more ghosting but pixelation artifacts for example. That normal viewers are troubled so much with having to retune so often (far more than was needed with UHF analogue TV) should be of concern to those of us who have some knowledge and experience - but more especially to Ofcom! However, as you quite rightly say, we see here a minority of viewers and not all of the ones who have problems, so we see a small sub-set of the viewing public's experiences, so we need to be careful not to assume what is reported here is the norm.
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Tuesday, 20 August 2013
M
Michael11:36 PM
Howell Edwards: Ah so now we're at the crux of the matter - you are having trouble with your Freeview reception, and according to you, it MUST be something to do with the transmitter! I must ask, how were you able to "virtually quarantee (sic)" that the problem is with the transmitter?
Freeview more valued than most other "British institutions" | Freeview news | ukfree.tv - 11 years of independent, free digital TV advice
My grandparents have no problems at all with Freeview and like the fact that there's lots of new channels for them to watch. If people are having problems then generally as MikeB says, it's more likely to be at your end than the transmitter.
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Wednesday, 21 August 2013
J
Jan6:04 PM
Llandysul
Last night I had 22 digital stations from Blaenplwyf . Today I had none until noon and 9 afterwards. really its not good enough. All I had done is switched the tv off last night at 1am and on at 11am, at SA44 6NL.
| link to this comment |
Jan's: mapJ's Freeview map terrainJ's terrain plot wavesJ's frequency data J's Freeview Detailed Coverage
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