All posts by MikeB
Below are all of MikeB's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
irene davison: If you click on the links next to your question, you can see for yourself. The DigitalUK website reckons your OK with a normal aerial, but the home to mast plot does show some hills very close to you.
Indoor aerials are not generally very good, but you could have a go - put the aerial as high as you can, and buy something which isn't too expensive.
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Carl: Since brianist did a whole article about the costs of subscription, BBC 2017: The problem with turning Freeview into Payview to keep the 3% happy | BBC 2017 | ukfree.tv - 11 years of independent, free digital TV advice , could you outline how this is to actually work on a practical level? I would suspect that it is not 'simples'.
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Joe: Cheap is not cheap, expensive is not expensive. I would regard KB aerials prices as pretty reasonable, and possible at the lower end of the spread. If you are paying £65, what are you actually getting?
ATV will sell a Log aerial for around £25 (I know that Toolstation sell a fancy looking thing for £13..). Clamps, poles, etc? perhaps another £15-20. Cable - around 65p a metre for the good stuff . It all adds up, and even by buying in bulk, a cheaper supplier, etc, there is going to be a cost. And does the person charge enough to allow them to have insurance, etc?
If someone is going on my roof, then I want them to be safe and for my property to be safe as well.
Its nice that the company you linked to has an 18 month warrenty, but sometimes you get what you pay for.
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Patrick Dunphy: Sky boxes have a digital optical out, so if your amp has a digital opitcal in the back, it should work. However, thats likely to be a fairly long lead!
The other thing to think about is putting your amp/tuner online (via wifi or bluetooth), and streaming instead. Might be easier, since you can buy a bluetooth receiver for less than £20 7dayshop Bluetooth Audio Receiver - Links your car or home audio system / Hi-Fi to your Bluetooth device - 7DAYSHOP.COM
and then stream from a tablet, phone, etc. Of course you could use a streamer directly, perhaps Airport EXpress or the like.
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Brian Donaldson: If your getting 'no signal', thats your TV telling you its getting no feed from your aerial - check your aerial system.
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Colin Campbell: Its possibly worth checking your signal strength first - my parents-in-law complained that their Freeview signal occasionally broke up a little. I had a look a their signal strength - the Panasonic was reading 100%! Even though the signal was coming all the way from Yorkshire, they had the problem (only occasionally) of too strong a signal!
It might be that you have the same problem - too strong, not too weak. Boosters might help, but I'd check out general strength first, and if you supply your TV's make and model, it might be that it has a sat. tuner in it as well, which might be a better solution for the long term.
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Stan: You might indeed know people who use the FM on their FM/DAB radio, but Mark is right, 25% of all listening is done via DAB, and thats only going to grow, whether it be DAB, DAB+ or whatever. FM sets have falling sales, while digital sets remain constant.
I really cant imagine anyone buying a DAB set to be part of 'the in crowd' (if they wanted to be trendy, they'd be streaming via their £2k Ruark 7, as seen in Sherlock). Out of the 101 radio's on the website of the people I work for, 89 have have DAB, and 53 have FM - thats the market (and they start at around £35). And despite the strongly held views of people who believe that FM is much superior, frankly, most people dont really care one way or another. But they do know that they can't get Radio 6 Music on analogue...
He is also right about other devices being used to listen - my cheap phone has FM (although I've never used that function), but if you have a smartphone, tablet, etc, you can just stream via the net. Again, this is only going to grow. The point we have to make again and again is that people listening in any way but analogue simply means less people using analogue - thats it.
I wouldn't compare the sound from the DAB radio you bought (this one? B&M Stores: > Aves DAB Radio - 281392 ) with a decent radio from 30 years ago, any more than I would compare it with a decent DAB radio like an Evoke 2. Its a cheap radio from a brand which has mixed reviews (have a look at Amazon), and a 2.5w speaker (although it is DAB+ !). I suspect it was pretty ropey on FM as well. I know that the DAB bitrate isn't all that it should be, but its not the signal strength, or even the broadcast method - its the radio.
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Conor: You could see Caroline Thomson's speech as sending a message to get the phone companies tanks off Freeview's lawn, in much the same way that Freeview's previous CEO made much of the possible problems with 4G interference.
Its certainly true that the less of the spectrum Freeview has, the more it threatens the platforms existence, but its early days yet, and I'm sure Digital UK will lobby very hard.
Not everyone wants or can have Freesat, or any other system, so its important to have choice.
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muhammad : or they could get BBC Iplayer via Itunes, etc, and pay for content, rather than mooching off actual licence fee payers. See here: BBC iPlayer - Help - Can I use BBC iPlayer outside the UK?
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Monday 28 April 2014 7:26PM
Stan: I agree about Thistimemaybe's DAB radio's - it will happen at some point in the future, and by then those radio's might be defunct anyway. Since DAB+ didn't really become standard until 2007, if you got them a decade ago, its unlikely. However, I wouldn't worry, and just cross that bridge when we come to it.
As for Wales - this was a long time ago, but I think the fact that the village was in a deep valley meant that reception was generally pretty awful, hence the central aerial high on the mountain and a cable system. These days, I suspect that Virgin or Sky has a good amount of business in the area!
Again, it should be repeated that analogue will only be switched off when there is enough coverage and there is at least 50% of the population listening via digital. Since they have not yet pulled the plug on LW, when the numbers listening are so low, means that FM is unlikely to go anytime soon.