All posts by Ian
Below are all of Ian's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
"following your engineering works" and "no-one is actually helping us resolve it. Is anyone there???"
There seems to be a misconception that this this site is connected with the broadcasters or the transmitter companies - it is not. It is an independent site. See the about page ukfree.tv is managed by Brian Butterworth | About us | ukfree.tv - 10 years of independent, free digital TV advice
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Tony Hamer: "Why can you do what they seem to do in the South West and put a message on the screen that tells people to re-tune their TV/Freeview box?"
We had a message on screen when you first switch on (around 1/3 size of screen) for the last few weeks clearly stating that a retune would be required on 10th April
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Tom Linson, you seem to be under the illusion that this site (ukfree.tv) is responsible for the transmitters. It is an independent information and informal support site. See ukfree.tv is managed by Brian Butterworth | About us | ukfree.tv - 10 years of independent, free digital TV advice
Depending on the age of your TV/box, you should be given the option to choose the region. If not, unplug the aerial and wait until the scan reaches the 40s to plug it back in. This should stop it scanning and finding the Welsh channels.
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For reference, according to my Humax HD's signal test menu:
Ch49: Signal 80%, Quality 100%
Ch50: Signal 80%, Quality 100%
Ch55: Signal 77%, Quality 100%
Ch58: Signal 76%, Quality 100%
Ch59: Signal 76%, Quality 100%
Oddly, Ch54 (HD) shows no signal no quality, yet is working perfectly. It shows similar signals to above on channel banner though.
So for me, the signal strength on the two problem channels appears to be higher. They are certainly not broadcasting at lower power!
My Panasonic TV (non-HD) shows all channels at 10/10 for signal and quality.
My guess is that 49/50 is being blocked for some, either by a misconfigured communal aerial or by some other box, like a VCR that is still outputting an analogue signal around Ch49/50.
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jb38: a good point about C/D aerials - this coupled with possible ageing aerial connections and coax down-leads means 49/50 could be borderline for some, although my parents' 1980s aerial and coax are working fine.
Dave in Preston: Curious as to why you had to buy a new aerial for digital switchover as the aerial group for Winter Hill before and after digital switchover was the same C/D.
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Back in 1985 at the age of 16,, I attended, with 150 other teenagers from across Europe, a conference in Turin called "Young People, New Technologies". One of the things we were shown was IBC, or Integrated Broadband Communications, whereby it was predicted that the current TV aerial, phone line, computer communications would all be replaced by a single fibre to each home and all of these would come via this. BT are stopping selling the POTS telephone service in the next 5-7 years as we are increasingly using mobiles or VOIP. I'm only surprised that it has taken this long to get here. The broadcast network has only just managed to include HD and is already being overtaken by online 4K/UHD offerings.
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Thursday 11 April 2013 7:05PM
No problem with retune here on a Panasonic TV and Humax HD recorder.
I did have to help my parents who live halfway between Winter Hill and Moel-y-Parc as their TV kept choosing Welsh channels. A channel wipe and re-tune (as suggested at the bottom of this page) did the trick.
Some boxes/TVs are clearly having a problem forgetting the existing channel settings, so just because your box doesn't retune but thousands of others do, does not mean there is a transmitter fault nor can any engineers change anything on the transmitter to fix that.