Freeview Outage

[*SueW* 10]

Thank you for your very informative post. I’m now completely baffled! I’m hoping that when my son is eventually able to come over that he can sort it for us. I may be mistaken but this seems to have started since we bought a new Humax recorder. We paid to have it fitted. But as I said it just may be coincidence. Anyhow thanks once again for taking the trouble to reply 

[MrChemist 10]

It's the weather.

 

No, really, the radio waves for modern digital services are very short, they are close to microwaves, and this gives two adverse effects:

1. You really need line-of-sight for a good signal, so if you can't see the transmitter, you're relying on various physics effects, reflections, refractions, diffraction, spreading effects and so on.

2. They are absorbed by water.  Like when it rains.  That's why it's been decent reception for a month and not for the past few days.

 

Feel free to disbelieve me, it doesn't sound like a perfect answer, but that's what I get.  I'm in Ecclesall, the transmitter is at Crosspool and there's a hill in the way of the signal.  So it's fine until the weather changes.  I have had my aerial replaced with a bigger one and it's been better since, but it often goes poor as soon as the weather changes.  If the wind gets up, that pushes the aerial around (it's only got one bracket) and disrupts the signal, too.

 

It's my experience that the Humax boxes (yes, I've got one of them, too) can be more touchy about getting a good signal than TVs, or it can be the other way around, depends on your TV.

[zach 234]

6 hours ago, MrChemist said:

It's the weather.

 

No, really, the radio waves for modern digital services are very short, they are close to microwaves, and this gives two adverse effects:

1. You really need line-of-sight for a good signal, so if you can't see the transmitter, you're relying on various physics effects, reflections, refractions, diffraction, spreading effects and so on.

2. They are absorbed by water.  Like when it rains.  That's why it's been decent reception for a month and not for the past few days.

 

Feel free to disbelieve me, it doesn't sound like a perfect answer, but that's what I get.  I'm in Ecclesall, the transmitter is at Crosspool and there's a hill in the way of the signal.  So it's fine until the weather changes.  I have had my aerial replaced with a bigger one and it's been better since, but it often goes poor as soon as the weather changes.  If the wind gets up, that pushes the aerial around (it's only got one bracket) and disrupts the signal, too.

 

It's my experience that the Humax boxes (yes, I've got one of them, too) can be more touchy about getting a good signal than TVs, or it can be the other way around, depends on your TV.

 

I thought this was only an issue on satellite, as I said...thought.

 

Sue, you will also need to retune the Humax box.  Anything that has a tuner, has to be retuned on changes. On my home setup this included all TVs, HDHomerun (device for sending live TV to tablets, phones and other devices) and the tuner card in my PC. My main TV is by far the pain, that takes about 30 minutes to retune. All pretty much the same though, set country, area (Yorkshire) City and/or postcode, then let them do their thing.

[iansheff 88]

22 hours ago, zach said:

I can't say I've had any issues but I use a satellite card in my PC for main viewing. On the TV that's on the aerial, that seem OK too. As I put below, I don't watch TV much so I may just have been lucky at the times I've watched.

 

Freeview is free to air TV through an aerial

Freesat is free to air TV through a satellite dish

 

Some have the word "play" after them but not sure what that does as I don't have it. I'm not much of a TV viewer so I'll pass that bit on to someone in the know 😉

Freeview Play is built into the TV Guide, it allows you to go back 7 days on certain channels and watch a programme, find the programme you want to watch and select it. It just means you don't have to go to the different apps like iplayer, ITVhub and All4.

Edited May 1, 2020 by iansheff

[*SueW* 10]

Thanks so very much to everyone for the advice you have given. No problems so far today 🤞 🤞