All posts by D Hall
Below are all of D Hall's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
jb38 thank you for your thoughtful reply. You are quite right, despite being 6-7 miles from Sutton Coldfield, there is no line-of-site for me. I am in a dip, and what may be worse, there are a line of power pylons marching away over the hill in direct line towards the SC mast.
All my neighbours have aerials pointing in several directions (as you would guess) and many had aerial upgrades mounted some 15-20 feet above their roofs during the pre-switchover period, but I did not. My wide-band aerial is only about 2-3 feet above the roofline, and gave good reception except during Winter months, when 1, sometimes 2 muxes would break up.
After switchover, nothing much changed except the digibox readings went up from roughly 20-30% level to roughly 70-85 % level. Reception is just as before, generally very good, with occasional lack of picture on just one mux and that only during the coldest periods only.
Interestingly, one can watch the 'quality' reading when a channel is breaking up, and can see it slowly pulsing over a few seconds in a manner that is possibly symptomatic of a distant signal at the same frequency drifting in and out of phase.
I will try to test using just a set-top aerial as you suggest. My aerial feeds three sets, and all I have tried so far is a 12db attenuator before the better sets, which made no difference at all.
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Carmen,
cold weather may affect your reception on one or two muxes due to interference caused by a distant transmitter using the same channels (see inversion effect).
But losing many or all channels is also likely to be water entering the outside aerial connector or wiring. Only a good installer can help you with that.
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How does this affect LBC on DAB ?
Are we to lose LBC entirely in the West Midlands - that would be a hanging matter for my missus !!
Weds about 3:30pm LBC just went off-air !!! 5:30pm now and still nothing !!
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The whole problem with so-called 'surveys' that 'prove' this or that - in this case that nobody gives a toss about LBC - is very simple. For every 10,000 people who are sitting fuming at the loss of a well-enjoyed service, only ONE knows about this site and can express an opinion.
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Page 2
Saturday 18 February 2012 12:57PM
During the recent cold spell, I again had trouble receiving just one of the Muxes (COM6) in Great Barr Birmingham.
This is exactly as before the power-up when the signals were low. Now they are high the problem persists, on different Muxes, exactly as I predicted they would do, it is interference from more distant broadcast sites is all that has changed.
As I have said before, no matter how well-spread the channel frequencies are around the country, those using the same frequency will interfere at some times during the year. The whole concept of freeview has this inglorious fault that would never have occurred if the powers-that-be had ignored the whole idea ofground-based broadcast and gone for renting a satellite.