Full Freeview on the Sudbury (Suffolk, England) transmitter
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The symbol shows the location of the Sudbury (Suffolk, England) transmitter which serves 440,000 homes. The bright green areas shown where the signal from this transmitter is strong, dark green areas are poorer signals. Those parts shown in yellow may have interference on the same frequency from other masts.
Are there any planned engineering works or unexpected transmitter faults on the Sudbury (Suffolk, England) mast?
Sudbury transmitter - Sudbury transmitter: Possible effect on TV reception week commencing 18/11/2024 Pixelation or flickering on some or all channels 
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Digital television services are broadcast on a multiplexes (or Mux) where many stations occupy a single broadcast frequency, as shown below.
64QAM 8K 3/4 27.1Mb/s DVB-T MPEG2
H/V: aerial position (horizontal or vertical)
The Sudbury (Suffolk, England) mast is a public service broadcasting (PSB) transmitter, it does not provide these commercial (COM) channels: .
If you want to watch these channels, your aerial must point to one of the 80 Full service Freeview transmitters. For more information see the will there ever be more services on the Freeview Light transmitters? page.
Which Freeview channels does the Sudbury transmitter broadcast?
If you have any kind of Freeview fault, follow this Freeview reset procedure first.Digital television services are broadcast on a multiplexes (or Mux) where many stations occupy a single broadcast frequency, as shown below.
64QAM 8K 3/4 27.1Mb/s DVB-T MPEG2
H/V: aerial position (horizontal or vertical)
The Sudbury (Suffolk, England) mast is a public service broadcasting (PSB) transmitter, it does not provide these commercial (COM) channels: .
If you want to watch these channels, your aerial must point to one of the 80 Full service Freeview transmitters. For more information see the will there ever be more services on the Freeview Light transmitters? page.
Which BBC and ITV regional news can I watch from the Sudbury transmitter?
BBC Look East (East) 0.8m homes 3.2%
from Norwich NR2 1BH, 77km north-northeast (24°)
to BBC East region - 27 masts.
70% of BBC East (East) and BBC East (West) is shared output
ITV Anglia News 0.8m homes 3.2%
from NORWICH NR1 3JG, 78km north-northeast (24°)
to ITV Anglia (East) region - 26 masts.
All of lunch, weekend and 80% evening news is shared with Anglia (West)
Are there any self-help relays?
| Felixstowe West | Transposer | 1000 homes +1000 or more homes due to expansion of affected area? | |
| Witham | Transposer | 14 km NE Chelmsford. | 118 homes |
How will the Sudbury (Suffolk, England) transmission frequencies change over time?
| 1984-97 | 1997-98 | 1998-2011 | 2011-13 | 1 Aug 2018 | |||||
| B E T | B E T | B E T | E T | K T | |||||
| C29 | SDN | ||||||||
| C31 | ArqA | ||||||||
| C35 | C5waves | C5waves | |||||||
| C37 | ArqB | ||||||||
| C41 | ITVwaves | ITVwaves | ITVwaves | D3+4 | D3+4 | ||||
| C44 | BBC2waves | BBC2waves | BBC2waves | BBCA | BBCA | ||||
| C47 | C4waves | C4waves | C4waves | BBCB | BBCB | ||||
| C51tv_off | BBC1waves | BBC1waves | BBC1waves | ||||||
| C56tv_off | ArqB | ||||||||
| C58tv_off | SDN | ||||||||
| C60tv_off | -ArqA |
tv_off Being removed from Freeview (for 5G use) after November 2020 / June 2022 - more
Table shows multiplexes names see this article;
green background for transmission frequencies
Notes: + and - denote 166kHz offset; aerial group are shown as A B C/D E K W T
waves denotes analogue; digital switchover was 6 Jul 11 and 20 Jul 11.
How do the old analogue and currrent digital signal levels compare?
| Analogue 1-4 | 250kW | |
| SDN, ARQA, ARQB, BBCA, D3+4, BBCB | (-4dB) 100kW | |
| Analogue 5 | (-7dB) 50kW | |
| Mux 2* | (-14.9dB) 8.1kW | |
| Mux B* | (-15.2dB) 7.5kW | |
| Mux 1* | (-15.5dB) 7kW | |
| Mux A* | (-17dB) 5kW | |
| Mux C* | (-22.2dB) 1.5kW | |
| Mux D* | (-23.6dB) 1.1kW |
Which companies have run the Channel 3 services in the Sudbury transmitter area
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Friday, 29 July 2011
Dr. R. D. Feltham: I am very unsure why Digital UK would have not made it clear that the Sudbury switchover would have the effect that it did. Can you provide a link to a place where such misleading information was given out?
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J
James Clifford11:08 AM
I have a Samsung TV with Freeview built in.
I have my original analogue aerial on the roof.
Since DSO the only channels that i can see on Freeview are Yesterday, Film4 and a couple of shopping channels.
If I install a new aerial will I get more stations? Or should i be doing something else.
My postcode area is CB8.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
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James Clifford: No, you should wait until the end of November for the multiplex to move to the new frequency as this will restore your service. A new aerial would be a waste of your money.
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Mike Dimmick2:44 PM
James Clifford: Can you get the BBC and ITV channels at all? Did you have digital TV before switchover?
If you had digital before switchover, and you can't get BBC channels or ITV, *and* you had poor analogue reception before switchover, there's a possibility that you actually had the wrong group aerial for Sudbury. It could have been a group C/D. This particularly might be the case if best analogue signals came from a relay, and the aerial was moved around to point to Sudbury for digital. You need a group E or wideband aerial (which cover groups B and C/D) for all services from Sudbury.
If you had clear analogue reception before switchover, you may now have too much signal, causing the signal to be distorted and undecodable. If you have a booster or amplifier, try removing it or turning it down. If you don't have one, or that doesn't help, try adding an attenuator.
If you do have the channels listed above under PSB1/BBC A and PSB2/D3&4, it's likely that your aerial is a Group B (which was all that was needed for analogue reception). A change to a Group E or wideband is likely to be necessary for reliable reception of the commercial multiplexes, both at their current temporary location and their final homes.
I would have expected you to have most trouble with ArqB, which carries Yesterday and Film4, because it's on the lowest power level. That may well point to it being a problem with too much signal.
We need a full postcode to see what the prediction for your location is. A postcode area covers hundreds of homes and usually a few miles, so isn't precise enough. UHF reception can vary greatly over distances of only a few metres.
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Mike Dimmick4:51 PM
Dr. R. D. Feltham: The biggest lie that Digital UK have been propogating is that it will be two stages and done. That isn't true for quite a lot of areas, where there is a clash of allocated channels with those used by another region that is yet to switch over. In these cases there can be many later stages of power increases and sometimes mode changes and channel changes. At Sudbury, there's a channel change in November to get out of the way of Tacolneston's switchover, and final channels and power levels can only be adopted once Dover has switched over next June.
However, power *has* been increased on all six multiplexes already, albeit - for three multiplexes *not* carrying any historical analogue channels - not yet to the final designed level. This power increase is the *source* of problems for a number of people whose aerial system was upgraded for digital, as often those systems have too much gain, causing distortion. That distortion was barely noticeable on analogue, for digital it can prevent the system decoding.
It doesn't help that the strength meters on many boxes mis-report the level if the multiplex can't be decoded, and give the impression that they can handle far higher inputs than they actually can. (On my box, the DTG-recommended lower and upper limits falls at 17% and 58%.) The boxes frequently don't store the best/strongest version, either, sometimes storing signals from further away, again giving the impression that there has been a reduction when in fact it's that a distant transmitter has had a large increase, and your box is now incorrectly storing that rather than the transmissions from the mast your aerial is pointing at.
Again, in some cases, a nearby signal is too distorted after the power increase, preventing a box that does store the best signal from using what should have been the best, causing it to store a weaker distant transmission, which would appear to be a reduction in signal strength.
Please also be aware that signal propogation varies over time, with changes in weather conditions. The scale of this variation can be 100 times or more, and it can vary by frequency, giving different levels of variation on different multiplexes. The small power increases for the muxes yet to reach full power are smaller than this scale of variation, so on some days received levels could be lower than before switchover, despite the actual increase in transmission power. (On the worst days, even the PSB muxes could have a received level lower than the best days for the pre-switchover Mux 1 and 2.)
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Wednesday, 3 August 2011
R
R.J.Hamshere9:09 AM
Since the switch over the picture has improved and we get all stations, however the picture freezes from time to time, and the voice is out of sinc. occasionally. Is there a problem your end, or could it be trees cutting the signal or some other reason? Your advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
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R.J.Hamshere: I would give My Freeview box has no EPG, is blank on FIVE, ITV3, ITV4, ITV2+1, has no sound or the channel line up is wrong | ukfree.tv - independent free digital TV advice a go. I can't really help more without a full postcode.
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Friday, 5 August 2011
D
Dr. R. D. Feltham4:09 PM
Witham
Hi Briantist, thanks for your reply. The claims I refer to were in a leaflet entitled "Your guide to switchover" posted to all TV subscribers in the Anglia TV region prior to DSO and published on the Digital UK web site. (They have probably removed those statements from the web site now since they told me after my complaint that they would remove them.) They claimed for example that the Sudbury power transmitted would be increased for all channels at DSO (implying that would be at the original 250 000 Watts) and that there is no such thing as a digital antennea; they also stated that if a subscriber received a good strength analogue signal prior to DSO they would not need to change their antenna. They did not mention the changes to multiplex format which result now in some channels having an effective weaker field strength for many licensees.
However, the effect for me has been that although the Freeview field strength for the BBC multiplex blocks has increased from what it was before DSO it is still much lower than the analogue transmissions were, and unreliable; the effect for the other channels in field strength for me has been such a significant fall that I can no longer receive them with all previous equipment as it was. Reception of the BBC blocks is also variable with weather conditions, at times some channels being lost altogether, particularly ITV and BBC News24.
As such I feel the complete DSO has been handled incompetently and a pack of lies has been published and propagated about the whole debacle to pre-condition the public. The reception of public TV broadcasts in my home is now again like it was in the UK in the 1950s. We now in effect again have many fringe areas over much of the UK, and one can no longer use any portable with an attached antenna unless you happen to be close to the transmitter. That is not suitable for what is supposed to be an advanced country in the 21st century.
It all means that many licensees will need a new high-gain wide band external antenna fitted to receive all channels as well as a digital receiver box. The digital receiver boxes of some became obsolete overnight at DSO. None of this was honestly publicised and if it have had been many people would have been outraged, as many are now when they find out what is really going on.
So the key effects have been that many who could receive Freeview before now cannot continue to receive all the channels which they could before DSO unless they spend even more money and throw away their now useless digital receivers and fit a new roof-top aerial. The real transmitter power has been reduced from 250 000 Watts to only 100 000 Watts; that is a reduction of more than 50% and evidently there is no intention to ever restore it to its previous level, although there is no plan to halve the licence fee with the costs saved. Thus it is no wonder that there are so many reception problems.
It is all another example of present day governments' smoke and mirrors approach to everything by means of lies and deceit.
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Dr.'s: mapD's Freeview map terrainD's terrain plot wavesD's frequency data D's Freeview Detailed Coverage
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Dr. R. D. Feltham4:18 PM
Witham
Hi Mike, thanks for your response and the information you give.
By the way, my problems are not due to excessive signal strength, but due to weak signal strength. I have checked all things very carefully.
As you point out one of the lies was the inference that DSO would be a two=stage process. It is clearly not. The real issue for Sudbury I feel is that the power transmitted is being reduced by more than 50% to only 100 000 Watts long-term..
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Dr.'s: mapD's Freeview map terrainD's terrain plot wavesD's frequency data D's Freeview Detailed Coverage
Dale
4:58 PM
Ipswich
4:58 PM
Ipswich
Dr Feltham : I agree with much of what you say, however my understanding is that 100kW for a digital transmission should more than replace a 250kW analogue transmission : the reduction to 40% is fairly average, with some transmitters ending up even lower.
Overall I agree that Digital UK have somewhat hoodwinked people around here. And, the local press (in my case Ipswich Evening Star) are complicit in the deception : through reading information on this site, and elsewhere, I was aware of the shortcomings of DSO at Sudbury, and sent a long letter to said newspaper to warn other viewers of possible problems (i.e. low power on 3 Muxes until June 2012 ; requirement for new aerial if you still had a Group B ; etc) BUT the paper refused to publish it because it contradicted the official view from Digital UK that they had published earlier. Even when some people complained to the paper a few days after DSO that they had poor/no reception, they still resolutely ignored the information that I had sent them, and continued to mis-inform their readership be re-hashing Digital UK's previous broken promises. A poor show, I feel.
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Dale's: mapD's Freeview map terrainD's terrain plot wavesD's frequency data D's Freeview Detailed Coverage
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