All posts by Michael Perry
Below are all of Michael Perry's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
sharon mc murray:
To be able to help you contributors to this website need to know what make and model each of your equipments are. An indication of where you live is also useful, by a post code of where you are or a nearby shop, etc.
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Briantist:
Not all the backbone is fibre optic, just the major trunk connections and a growing number of links to sub-exchanges. Openreach are still laying new fibre in our general area to let them replace copper as the link between exchanges - lots still to do yet.
Though our own phone lines are copper, many newer areas had aluminium laid as it was cheaper - but has higher resistance so higher attenuation over longer distances.
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Charles Stuart:
Try doing a search for "Bristol Aerials", you will find there are quite a number of aerial retailers and installers in and around the Bristol area. many also sell other aerial related items and satellite equipment.
Remember, don't let them talk you into a 'digital aerial' as ALL UHF aerials are perfectly capable of receiving analogue and 'digital' signals. Just make sure you buy a good quality log periodic - it will last you well and be suitable for any future changes that may occur.
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Briantist:
There are other scenarios, such as main TV has no Freeview built in but STBs used for Sky and/or Freeview. Many who still like to watch on their TV set they had before Freeview started (often CRT types) and still works well enough for them will have obtained STBs rather than change the TV set. Flat panel TVs were quite expensive back then but have come down in price significantly since, but many work on 'if it isn't broke, don't fix it' so still have the benefits (?) of a CRT.
On the use of the internet for controlling authorisation (note the UK spelling please) is fraught with problems as well as many older people do not have an internet service, they see no benefit to them so don''t pay the extra for something they don't use. With no internet, no authorisation. Plus not everyone has WiFi in the home nor an Ethernet point somewhere near enough to the TV to connect that way. Some, but not all, new homes are having Ethernet cabling included but builders often assume WiFi will be the 'default' in homes.
When refurbishing our lounge, I went to the lengths of installing two satellite points fed from two of the four LNB outputs (the other two feed into the conservatory for summer viewing), a down and up link in CT100 for terrestrial signals, a phone point, an Ethernet point plus two twin-gang mains sockets. They ar all grouped together in a corner behind our TV equipment, so largely out of sight. I'm able to do all of that work because of my experience and certification, but most non-DIYers do not have the required knowledge perhaps and few will have the certification needed for the mains work. The phone and Ethernet is not something many consider doing, or having done, despite how useful it is.
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Briantist:
I would strongly recommend leaving 3G out of the equation as its coverage is not sufficient to satisfy the viewers in almost all areas, only a mjority of areas can use it and significant numbers cannot. Where I live, rural North Wiltshire, there is no 3G signal at all (shown by a visitor's 3G dongle getting zero signal) and we are by no means unusual.
With the know better coverage of the 800 MHz band, that would possibly give a more complete reception and possibly good enough for this usage - but it will need to be validated by proper field tests. So 4G my have a use after all!
All three of my dictionaries and both computer spell checkers (set to English UK rather than English US) insist on use of the 's' and not 'z'. A school teacher friend tells me the mark down work using the 'z' spellings for English papers. So I go with what I was taught to be correct English spellings and what a current school teacher, who is also an exam marker, recommends. One of my jobs before retirement was as a Technical Author for a world-wide software house in the EDA area and they generally used English US spellings and grammar, so I am well used to the differences but still much prefer the English UK forms.
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Ian
It is possible, and worth checking, that the gain of the 4-way distribution amplifier is giving too much signal at each TV set! Worth using a decent signal strength meter at the output from the aerial and then at each output of the dist. amp. Many digital tuners are not able to handle a strong signal so incorrectly report 'no signal' (they do that because the signal is too strong to be decoded so to the software it appears that there is no signal available, which is not the case). The fact that each set works normally with the direct input from the aerial but not with the amplified signal strongly suggests that may well be the case.
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Briantist and Neil:
There are two primary means of delivering fast broadband to homes, FTTC and FTTP.
Fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) brings the main fibre feed to an area into a green cabinet by the roadside. From there the BT method means it is distributed to each connected home via cable pairs similar to that used for the landline telephones, indeed some use the existing cabling for that connection. These cables are often referred to as copper but may be aluminium if they were laid in the last 20 years or so. Virhgin Media use a coaxial cable run into the home to Virgin supplied terminal equipment.
Fibre to the premises (FTTP) brings the fibre into the home and connects to a small wall mounted box that then feeds into the router, such as a BT Home Hub 5. I am not aware that Virgin provide any FTTP.
FTTC can be quite fast but FTTP is required for the very fastest type of connection. There are other means of providing internet services but these are mainly aimed at commercial users and generally beyond the affordability of domestic customers. Some of these are fibre based and others use gigabit ethernet systems at the delivery end.
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Briantist
The point is that some areas have *no* 3G coverage at all so any attempt at communication, either way, in that band is bound to fail in unserved areas - and there's enough of those for it to be not worth considering as a 'national' means of decryption control. GPS is another matter but there are still 'not spots' so I would imagine 4G would be a better solution providing it performs sufficiently well in coverage terms durinmg tests. Computer predictions are notoriously inaccurate still (F1 teams are finding that, especially Ferrari last year when wind tunnel results were very different from the predicted information from the computer modelling).
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DaveR
I live in Bremhill parish but nearer to Lyneham and get all our services either from Sky with a minidish or Freeview from Mendip with an 11 element C/D yagi that is now some 40 years old.
The terrain of Calne and the surrounding hills is the problem as TV signals do not like 'bending'. Hence the large number of 'fill in' relays that were built in the analogue days, and most now used as Freeview Lite sources. As you rightly state, the Calne transmitter is one of those and as it serves few people, in commercial pay-back terms, there is little justification for the commercial broadcasters to provide their signals at great expense - they have to pay to be carried on any multiplex.
So the reception from Mendip is severely affected by the hill with Bowood House and Derry Hill village getting in the way of direct line of sight. Hence some have opted for attempts to get reception from Oxford, but again there are hill problems because of the 'bump' at the top of Abberd Way and beyond (roughly, attempting to look through the hill above Broad Hinton on the road to Malborough). Obviously, to get anything people have invested heavily in receiving aerial equipment that might get signals most of the time but be subject to high wind loading factors. In my former work as a service engineer and then Technical Training Manager for a major TV rental company that was based in Swindon I saw a great many customers in similar situations in the East Midlands and Surrey/Sussex/Kent areas I worked in before promotion and then retirement.
All these matters are not political so any general election outcome is extremely unlikely to affect the future development of Calne, if any.
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Saturday 29 March 2014 8:21PM
I'm in a rural part of Wiltshire in a small hamlet (too small even to be a village) and we have overhead copper wires- yes, they're copper according to my friendly Openreach engineer. We do get a sort of broadband that varies between 1 Mbps and 3 Mbps - Openreach don't know why it varies so much!
So we don't benefit from anything that some do and I agree we should not generalise as much as some like to do.
Plus we don't hold out any real hope of improvements even though we are in an 'intervention' area. Our exchange is still 20CN so not even ADSL2 capable.