All posts by MikeB
Below are all of MikeB's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
John Sage: 4G problems are actually very unlikely, and the Hannington transmitter has no problems.
If you can check the Linsar, look at the signal strength, and then trace back the signal from the tv through the lead to the socket, and up to the aerial, because it sounds like a loose connection. When a TV says no signal, it means that there is a problem actually getting a signal from the aerial - so its likely that the problem is a loose connection, bad coax, etc
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Michael Widen: If its doing it at the same time every night, then its electrical interference - check timers, etc and see this :https://ukfree.tv/fullstory.php?storyid=1107051307
Your just 12km from Hannington, but there is something big blocking the signal path about a km from you, but it would be strange for such a problem to occur only during Downton!
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Lyn: If they are on one aerial, then its the aerial system itself, perhaps a powered splitter?
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Trevor Harris: Despite your often repeated assertion that DAB is dead, people continue to buy Dab radios, and will certainly do so this Christmas. Internet radio, in whatever form, will grow, but that will not be a solution for many, nor need it be. I actually don't care how people listen, but they are increasingly listening digitally, in whatever form.
As usual, you've cherry picked a statistic from the Ofcom report - 14 percent of people who don't have dab might buy dab in the next year. Yet if Brianists scenario is right, they will buy one if they have to, and of courses my replacement radio is likely to have dab well before then. It would be interesting to see what people thought about going digital in the years up to tv switchover - I suspect many would have said the same thing.
As for replacements, your making your own costs much worse than they actually are. A clock radio with dab/docking for MP3 player or phone ( thus allowing Internet) is about £60. Car radios have dropped below £100, and that's likely to fall further, and a av system can easily have dab, or Internet added - blu tooth adapters are available for less than £30, and of course streaming via Apples airport express or similar is easy, and can be done for around £70 or less. As for mobiles - they all do wifi, blu tooth or Internet anyway, so why would they need dab?
Dab wippy and breakable aerials? Seemingly exactly the same aerial that I see on fm radios as well! What's sauce for the goose.....
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John Martin: I've just checked my tv and dab radio - 24 on tv, and 40 (including local) stations on my radio. Plus the fact that if you've got one tv, it's probably not much good if you want to wake up to radio in the morning.
As for wiring up your home with speakers - you could, but these things already exist - they are called radios, and are generally cheap, easy to use, and can pick up lots of stations. They are also portable and you can listen to a different station to the one on the tv.
Of course smart tv's do have apps to allow you to listen to Internet radio, etc - but since you can buy a dab radio for about £20, I'd start there.
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Dave: perhaps rather than blaming the BBC, we should blame Channel 5 - its they who do not want to go onto HD Freeview.
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Jo Haill: I have only ever seen one Freesat OCR with a DVD/Blu ray recorder, and Panasonic stopped making then some time ago.
Swapping a sky plus box for a freesat over is really easy, and is shown on this site. And of course you will get HD channels. The cheapest box is about £150, with the de factor standard being the Humax Freetime, which has all four channels on demand (the cheaper version does not do wifi, but the more expensive version, in white, has wifi built in).
Obviously check how many hdmi sockets your tv has. If you have two, one will be for the freesat box, and use the other for a new blu ray. At only £60 for a basic (2013) model, it will play cd's, dvd's (and upscale), blu ray and be smart. In fact it's the sneaky cheap way of making your tv smart. The cheaper ones, such as the Samsung F5500, will be 2d and will have to use a LAN to connect to the web, but a wifi one is only £99. They are as smart as the most expensive tv, and include Facebook, twitter, YouTube and of course iplayer. They don't come with an hdmi cable, but they are pretty cheap.
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john martin: If your solution is working for you, thats great. Its certainly an inventive and ingenious way of using redundant digiboxes and spare speakers.
However, its not a solution available to most people, and of course there are drawbacks. The boxes are tied to a mains supply and an aerial, and there are fewer channels than a normal DAB radio. Many of my customers also have a terrible fear of leaving anything on timer/standby (including their PVR's), so using their digibox would be unattractive.
Increasingly, people are streaming directly from all sorts of sources, using systems like Sonos, B& W etc, plus mobiles, tablets and Ipods, through to 'home-brew' systems using bluetooth and wifi. My radio has internet and other source wifi streaming capacity, and that sort of capacity will become more widespread.
However, for most people, radios are the easiest, most flexible way of listening.
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grace: Crystal Palace reports no problems, so there are two possiblities. One is that something in your system is faulty, such as a loose cable, etc.
However, I'd also check signal strength - your only 4KM from the transmitter, so it might be your signal is just too much for the TV.
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Monday 14 October 2013 10:32PM
Wayne: Further to the excellent advice from Neil Bell & MikeP, pretty much the only recorders around that can do this are the DVD/HDD ones from Panasonic (the EX773, EX83, etc), and they are largely being withdrawn - certainly I havn't seen one instore for a while. HD recorders tend not to even have scarts, and even when they do, you cannot vary the input to include scarts.