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All posts by Jon

Below are all of Jon's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.


I arrived here after Googling 'freeview problems', I can see no mention of engineering works, so this is our problem..
The last couple of days have seen problems with COM7 (UHF 31) DVB-T2 HD Mux - I can get the channels but they lock-up,freeze or pixelate to the point of being unwatchable.
COM 8 (UHF 37) DVB-T2 HD Mux has disappeared completely and attempting to manually scan UHF 37 locks on to the PAT, PMT & SDT but no channels found.

I spoke to a friend who suggested it may be due to 4G interference, but surely any 4G interference would cause problems on the muxes closer to 800mhz, PSB1 & PSB2 (745mhz & 777mhz, respectively.
The 2 muxes I am having problems with are COM7 at 554mhz & COM8 at 602mhz
So I doubt that is the problem, he also mentioned the trong wind we are experiencing at current.

I have no idea if he is talking rubbish or he is actually correct, Can anyone with proper technical know-how shed any light on this situation?

Thanks in advance - Jon

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J
Tacolneston (Norfolk, England) Full Freeview transmitter
Monday 16 November 2015 1:07PM
Norwich

Thanks for your reply MikeB :)

NR2 4HG

Firstly, the problems seem to have disappeared today and after manually rescanning the UHF numbers I now have all muxes and they all appear to be fine.
It all started started Friday evening around 9pm, initially on just com7, Saturday com7 was even worse and so I stupidly did a rescan.
This caused com8 to disappear and com7 to get even worse.yesterday (sunday) things got even worse with the SD muxes displaying the same symptoms.

This morning around 10am everything appeared to return to normal, a rescan got me back com8 and com7 appears to now be flawless.

The signal strength on the muxes has been and always is 90%, yet over the weekend when the problems started it was jumping from 90% to 5% constantly in sync with the picture break-up.

I would postulate that the weather is at fault, if I recall correctly we had a similar problem a couple of years ago with the 'newer' HD mux (BBC4 HD, BBC News HD etc) giving the exact same problems, but they seemed to disappear after a couple of days.

Thanks for the suggestion of an attenuator, it's something I will look in to if this problem resurfaces.
Thanks again MikeB for your help!

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I have returned to hopefully help other users.
It is almost unbelievable how crazy the explanation is.
It transpires that my issues with FV reception is down to my own stupidity, the weekend when I suffered all the problems I tried to print a document, my printer was out of ink so I pulled the printer out.
Doing this caused my speaker cable to rest upon my coax cable from the aerial!
When I put the printer back after the weekend I managed to move the speaker cable away from the coax. DOH!
I received my new cartridges for the printer yesterday and pulled the printer out to install them, upon putting the printer back it would appear that the speaker cable was again resting on the coax, and as a result COM7 was playing up last night.
Luckily I managed to equate that moving the printer was the problem, so I looked behind the printer, noticed the speaker cable upon the coax cable and moved them away from each other = problem solved!

So may advice to anyone suffering FV problems, check for any cables touching, it seems so stupid to say, but this clearly caused my issue.

I am so glad I did not get an engineer out or invest in any new hardware.

Thanks again for your help!

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Out of interest Mike, what strength attenuator would I require?
There appear to be variable ones (although these seem to get negative feedback) and they also come in 3dB, 6dB & 12dB flavours.
Which one would you recommend Mike?

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