All posts by MikeB
Below are all of MikeB's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Clare: You will ned an aerial - the BT box is basically a Humax PVR, which is Freeview. Easiest thing is to swap out your Sky box for a Freesat PVR - the Humax is basically the goto box. The current model is the 1000S, has a 1 gb hard drive, and costs about £209. It also gets you Freetime, which is catchup TV. You can buy a wireless dongle for it if you need it, but the 1010S (the white one) is around thirty quid more and has the wifi bult in.
If you want BT Sports, you'll need their box, or use their app or via PC.
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Nick Gaunt: Look at the top of the page - it says everything is fine. Might not be, but most likely to be your system.
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Andy: Starting from first principles - did you have decent recepetion before, what transmitter did you use, and when did the problem start?
Your system seems to have been completely replaced, so thats not it, and you've seemed to have turned off any other source of interference.
Dave Lindsay is right - if there was a turbine, then it would have been spotted!
Although you say your village is a nightmare for recepetion of phones, etc, your on top of a hill, with clear line of sight to the transmitter. In fact you have seemingly very good reception to several.
One thought did occur. Can you check that your actually tuned into the correct transmitter, and what the signal strength is. If you have got HD100 cable, a booster, F fittings, etc, then you potentially have a very good signal. Perhaps its too good!
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Andy: Unfortunately, you can have too much signal, and here is a whole page about it:
Freeview signals: too much of a good thing is bad for you
92% is really high - my Sony PVR was on 93% with very occasional breakup, but a lot of tuners are less forgiving, sich as Panasonics. 75% is more than fine.
I hate to break it to you, but your problem sounds like the signal strength was too high for your equipment (what is it?), and that possibly caused the breakup of the picture. Getting high quality cable, a new aerial and F fittings may have actually made the problem worse (the booster would certainly have done). Remember that you can actually see the transmitters - so your signal was always going to be good, looking at the terrain plot and Digital UK's page. I suspect that your old house was lower down with perhaps low signal strength, and so you thought that the new house had the same problem.
The Moel channels in the 800's is what TV's ect do when they find an alternative transmitter, and you can actually use them if you like. However, they might not be strong enough to record from. Dave Lindsay and myself both have Sony PVR's which have robust but sensitive tuners. They can actually pull in signals from a whole host of transmitters, but at such little strength that nothing records, and it took a 12db filter for this problem to mostly fix itself in my case.
I bought some of these things: 12dB Coax Plug Inline ATTENUATOR: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics
Really cheap, and they work. Your best buying a mixture of different strengths, and trying one that works. If you need more, then you can put them in series. They actually fit togeather, and all you need is an extra aerial lead at one end so there is not strain on any sockets. There are variable ones, but it didn't work for me.
This might no be the answer, but you've got very little to lose by buying perhaps eight pounds worth of attentuators and giving it a go.
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kai: if its not them, it must be you. Your manual will give the probable answer - your aerial has a fault, so there is either no signal, or so little that its not happening. Checking the aerial lead from the wall is a good satrt, and then follow it back from there.
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Ray Baldacchino: If you'd bothered to have a look at any of the articles Brian has written,
TV Licence decriminalization: just how much is it going to cost you?
you'd reject the idea of the BBC taking advertising as nonsense. There simply isn't the revenue for the BBC to take aslice of the pie, either to keep the BBC fed, or anyone else.
And adverts only at the end of programmes? This isn't the 1950's....
As for whether the Licence fee is a 'reasonable tax', nobody forces 93 percent of the viewing audience to watch BBC 1 in any particular week. And yet they do, including the people who get it on Sky. 97 percent of licence fee payers use BBC services on a weekly basis, and I'm not sure what the remaining percentage actually do - Jeremy Kyle perhaps?
When you can come up with a better way of paying for TV, that is economical, efficient and gives the best possible programming for the money, let us know.
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Colin Legg: netflix is an internet service, and has nothing to do with TV broadcasts at all. In fact you could well be watching it via 4G. If Netflix is buffering, thats probably due to your broadband speed.
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Louise Knight: We need your postcode to tell what sort of signal etc you might get.
Yes, you can use the existing coax, but its possibly easier to run new coax, so you can use your dish as well - although if you had Sky Plus you'd have one spare coax anyway. Google SatCure to see what sort of fittings they do to join it all together.
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Tricia Camm: Just put the postcode into the site, and there should be links to Digital UK, etc, which should tell you.
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Sunday 7 June 2015 9:36PM
Dave Lindsay: Looking at that plot, I'm also wondering why a booster would be needed! Or possibly even an aerial...
Keith Blackham: Remember that the Ridge Hill transmitter covers a large number of homes, so its not unusual to have several people complaining of poor reception.Even if 99.9 percent of people in an area have perfect reception, there will always be some people with a problem. But in the case of both you and Keith Adams, its far more likely to be issues with your system, rather than the transmitter.
Could you check which transmitter your actually on, and what mux's your getting. It might be that your picking up a transmitter much further away, especially if you've got a booster.