All posts by Mike Davison
Below are all of Mike Davison's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
I don't see any evidence of 'Red Button ' services on the new BBC HD channels. Come to think of it, there is precious little 'Red Button' service on BBC1HD or BBC2HD. Is this a planned demise, hoping that smart TV's, with internet connection, will take over releasing bandwidth on the multiplexes? Considering that the mighty german HD channels on Astra 1 satellite(19.2deg.East) seem to be firmly wedded to 'old-style' teletext why can't that be re-established. Oh I forgot to mention, it still is used for subtitling on CBBC-HD and CBeebies-HD on satellite, I've just checked.
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Forgot to mention that I was talking about the Freeview HD channels lack of 'Red Button' services. I can't comment on Freesat other than I've observed above since my HD-Sat receiver is non-Freesat.
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Ron Lake - I hope I'm not the only one wondering what you think needs sorting out. Everything seems to me to be on time or ahead. According to recent posts, even the antenna system for the Leeds local transmissions is ready for projected start in the new year. If there's no obvious takers for COM8 then there's no urgency for it. Things can change rapidly. It's not so many weeks since Aljazeera HD was shown as the only occupant of COM7.
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Roisin: Euronews OK on 12663MHz Horizontal polarisation 22000 Symbol Rate here in Yorkshire from Astra 2 28.2deg East. The Europe beam appears to cover NW Europe very well. Movies4men is on 12633MHz H so I can see where the frequency confusion can arise.
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Ron - Ah now I understand. It is frustrating seeing these warnings of spasmodic breaks but that's inevitable when so many services come from one site. I think a shoulder-shrug is the best reaction and hope it doesn't affect something you really want to see. Daytime TV can be as much affected as it needs to be so far as I'm concerned.
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M
Waltham (Leicestershire, England) Full Freeview transmitterFriday 27 December 2013 10:27AM
Wetherby
Mike P: You are technically correct that Sky have been providing digital TV on satellite longer than any terrestrial service but only by 6 weeks. Considering that Sky were part of the consortium set up in 1997 to get DTT going, you could say that their partners were left in the lurch when Sky pulled out in a possible commercial attempt to scupper DTT. I am not a fan of Sky and any subscription television. My philosophy is that if they don't want to make it easy to watch their programmes, it's their loss not mine. To get back to technical matters, pixellation - so what. That's a problem with MPEG2 which is greatly reduced on the MPEG4 HD channels which have far superior definition that analogue could never match for the bandwidth used. The only analogue system that came close was the old french 819 line interlaced system(monochrome only) which needed 14 MHz per channel.
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Mike P: really you should get your facts straight. I had a Hitachi IDTV in 2001 receiving the low power DIGITAL signals from Emley Moor before they were doubled in power and some were reduced to 16QAM from 64QAM to make the signal more robust. This IDTV did NOT have an internet connection. I don't think many did in 2001. The digital reception on that set was vastly superior to the analogue reception at my location by the way.
Briantist: thanks for the clarification on Sky's involvement with DTT.
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M
Waltham (Leicestershire, England) Full Freeview transmitterTuesday 31 December 2013 12:40AM
Wetherby
SeeMoreDigital: It appears that Red Button services do not exist on the HD channels on Freeview(not sure about Freesat). If there isn't room for that service, surely ordinary 'World Sytem' teletext would fit. All the German HD channels on Astra 19.2 have standard teletext. What's wrong with the old adage 'If it's not broken, don't fix it.' At least there would be some information service. We seem to be going backwards sometimes.
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M
Waltham (Leicestershire, England) Full Freeview transmitterTuesday 31 December 2013 11:50AM
Wetherby
SeeMoreDigital: Everyone thinks that old style teletext has gone but it hasn't. The subtitles can be brought up on my non-freesat Pace HD satellite box by selecting 'text' and the normal 100 page header comes up, then keying '888' and lo and behold subtitles appear on all BBC channels. Bloomberg is another satellite channel that brings up a '100' header line but I can't find any subtitles or further pages. Just in case you think it's a property of the Pace box, it's not, if there's no teletext, it tells me.
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Monday 9 December 2013 4:06PM
Wetherby
I know signal strength indications on STB's and TV's are a bit suspicious but the new Ch32 signal is reported at 58% and 100% quality on my Humax PVR, Ch41 is 61% so the reduced power of COM7 is not making a lot of difference.