All posts by Dave Lindsay
Below are all of Dave Lindsay's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Adrian: It's on a bearing of 68 degrees. Remember your compass uses Magnetic North which varies slightly by location rather than True North or Grid North.
I would suggest that you won't get a usuable signal from Nottingham, but instead should use Waltham, which is at 103 degrees and also carries East Midlands programmes.
Nottingham is vertically polarised and Waltham is horizontally polarised.
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Roger Parker: Select 8-day EPG - this is what's broadcast by Freeview.
Evidently the 14-day EPG service was made available by Top Up TV and as it's now ceased the extended EPG is no longer available.
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D Hardy: Using the splitter as a combiner is, by far, the cheapest and most straightforward possible solution. It isn't forced to work, but worth a try, particularly as there's no other straightforward solution.
The point is that the best practice way to combine two feeds is to have them filtered, which is how a diplexer works.
With your combiner, when receiving from Moel y Parc the Romiley aerial is connected and vice versa. Ideally, the one you don't want should be filtered out.
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xlcr: Queries of this nature can only really be addressed with knowledge of the location, preferably in the form of postcode, or that of a nearby property such as a shop. This is so that predictions of the signals available can be looked up.
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Betamax_man: Looking at satellite and Streetview photographs of the area it seems clear that reception from The Wrekin along the road your daughter lives on could be difficult due to the hospital building and the many trees in the area.
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Linda Stokes: Presumably you are receiving from Winter Hill transmitter. If any services are likely to be affected by a nearby 4G base station operating in the 800MHz band then it will be those you identify.
The organisation that can tell you if there are any 4G base stations in your area is at800. They may provide a free filter if it is suspected that this could be the cause of your issue.
Give them a ring and see what they say (bear in mind that it could be something unconnected with 4G signals):
Contact at800 / DMSL | General Enquiries | at800
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RICHARD BROWN: You should have all PSB services, which is more than 9!
See here:
DTG :: DTT Services by Multiplex
If you have a standard definition receiver then you will have PSB1 and PSB2. If it's HD as well then you will also have PSB3.
The other channels are the Commercial (COM) ones and they are only available from main transmitters and a select few smaller ones.
It's doubtful that you might receive all channels from Emley Moor due to being so far off line-of-sight. In such situations if you can then reception may not be perfect. Imperfections could be seasonal.
If you can't receive all channels terrestrially, then a satellite service such as Freesat may be the only way to increase your choice.
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xlcr: It could be a fault with the wiring, a connection or the aerial.
If you have a signal amplifier (booster) connected then you may need to remove it, or at least reduce its level, because it could potentially be pushing the level up too high, which could be the cause of your woes.
You said you have two TVs, so if they are fed by an amplifier then perhaps it is pushing the level up a bit too high. Different receivers have differing tolerances and sensitivities which is why these sorts of things affect some and not others.
Try bypassing any amplifier by connecting the incoming aerial feed to the feed going out to the room where the TalkTalk box is.
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Betamax_man: Different frequencies (UHF channels) are affected in different ways when they pass through/over objects which is why you get situations where not all signals are received at the same levels.
You may have experienced this if you ever used a set-top aerial with analogue reception. It was a case of putting the aerial in a location that allowed reception of all channels. Some may have been better than others.
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Saturday 23 November 2013 12:35PM
andrew burroughs: It is the case that the COM channels provide inferior coverage to that of the PSBs.
One of your neighbours reported that he could not receive C28, even with vertical polarisation:
Rowridge (Isle Of Wight, England) transmitter | ukfree.tv - 11 years of independent, free digital TV advice
Unfortunately the powers that be won't release the radiation patterns - these show how the transmitter throws out the signal in each direction. My suspicion is that the COM channels from Rowridge are directional with little or nothing to the south, whereas the PSBs are not. If this is the case then it is an example of where the COM channels are inferior in coverage terms.
It may be that the COM channel antennas don't point in your direction and that the "bits" of signal you are getting are off the back or edge of them. With that in mind, it is to be expected that the way in which these "bits" are scattered may vary by channel (frequency).
You can try turning your aerial for vertical polarisation, but this didn't help for Colin up the road.
Rowridge broadcasts horizontally and vertically (this being unique among the main stations). The PSBs are 200kW horizontally and vertically whereas the COMs are 50kW horizontally and 200kW vertically. A wideband aerial is not needed for Rowridge. Yagi widebands aren't as good on Group A channels, which Rowridge uses exclusively. If a yagi aerial is used it should be a Group A one.