All posts by Chris.SE
Below are all of Chris.SE's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Ryan Morris:
As you can see from the post before yours, the transmitter is having Planned Engineering. However, interruptions to transmission are normally brief, sometimes they may operate on reduced power or the reserve antenna (lower down the mast) but you still shouldn't have any problems.
If your signals haven't already returned, did you retune at all when you had no signal? This is never advised when you have no signal or badly pixellated pictures, you cannot tune to signals that aren't there or can't be decoded. The usual result is to clear your correct tuning oreven tune to weak signals from another transmitter which won't be reliable.
If you did retune, try again when signals are normal and check in your TV Tuning section that you are correctly tuned to Waltham's UHF channels as listed right at the very top of this page.
If you are still having problems with pixellation, have you had the Free Filter from Restore TV?
You should have received a postcard from them, to check, put your postcode in at
https://restoretv.uk/post…ure/
You may need to get in touch with them for the Filter as you are surrounded by Mobile phone masts.
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Cliff Tubb:
According to various checkers, Exeter St. Thomas could be somewhat tricky, but you should be able to get at least fair, if not good reception from Holcombe Down (to the south of you) or Budleigh Salterton (to the east of you) or Stockland Hill (to the northeast of you).
Only the main BBC National multiplex Block 12B: 225.648 MHz and
the Local Devon multiplex Block 11C: 220.352 MHz are likely to be available.
Have you tried repositioning your internal aerial so it has the clearest line of sight in those directions? i.e. no thick walls, large metal objects such as fridges/freezers etc., partition walls with foil linings, and so on.
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StevensOnln1:
Hiya, I've not come across that one before. I have had problems at various times accessing the whole site with assorted error messages - site not responding, too many connections and maybe some others. I don't know if it's when there's updates going on or what.
Hopefully @Briantist can sort it all out.
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That looks like a scam to me. His name don't seem to tally with Companies House information!
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R F Toner:
If you provide a full postcode we can check your predicted reception and see if we can advise anything that'll make you less vulnerable to issues when engineering work is taking place.
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Paul Dursley:
Hi Paul. Obviously frustrating.
Unless you have trees directly on the line-of-sight to both transmitters, then I suspect that water getting into the aerial connections and/or coax is still a strong possibility.
Whether you can safely get a ladder out (or have a friend that could) and have a closer look, it has to be a strong possibility with an installation this old. It only needs small cracks in various places, either on the aerial connector box and/or the coax for problems to show up, and of course it'll take a while for it to dry out after as well.
The problem with this sort of thing is you can't predict the exact effects. Sometimes you just get (maybe start off) with some attenuation, but then as the characteristic impedance changes depending where/how far along the coax the water may be, you can then get standing waves in the cable, these being frequency dependant. So at whatever that frequency may be, it can cancel out any signal or at best cause severe attenuation. And because it's frequency dependant, it won't necessarily affect all frequencies at all/or to the same extent.
The other thing that can affect off-beam signals to a degree, is propagation conditions.
I have an aerial pointing at Mendip (horizontal obviously) that can get some Wenvoe signals off sidelobes. I usually find C42 & C45 stronger and higher quality than C41 & C44 (none ever 100%) but the former adequate quality to decode, but today they are the other way about!! Rarely get any C47 & C39. But I can also get CCI from Oxford PSBs affecting Wenvoe PSBs and sometimes Hannington PSBs affecting Wenvoe COMs! A lot of this is obviously aerial performance and location dependant.
I keep meaning to experiment with another aerial to see what I can get!
Before 700MHz clearance, I recall a situation with a loft aerial, but the coax went out under a tile and down the roof and wall and in with no wall-plate, just looped up from floor level to the set. During some very wet weather, things started with a bit of attenuation of the highest frequency C64, later then some other lower frequencies were severely affected. Nothing obvious looking at the coax plug UNTIL the cable had been left unplugged lying on the floor and then a teaspoonful + of water came out of the plug!
Getting up to the roof, several cracks in the coax sheath were found and it was generally quite brittle.
In all these situations it's very much a case of "suck it and see" to use an expression (not literally!!).
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StevensOnln1:
Hi, yes frustrating. I have found the site slow to load an several occasions of late and sometimes refusing to connect. As you say, hopefully @Brian Butterworth can sort it out.
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StevensOnln1:
What sort of info do you get using a Geo-location service such as https://iplocation.io
If it's not showing up as in the UK on the results, you'd probably be best contacting your ISP asking them to request Geo-location services update the information.
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Thursday 2 May 2024 6:12AM
J Hobbs:
Please read the two posts before yours. There's obviously been a fault and engineering work is being carried out. Do NOT retune.