Freeview tuning issue

mrochester

mrochester

mrochester

Soldato
Joined
29 Sep 2003
Posts
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Location
Newcastle upon Tyne
Hi all

My grandma has a TV with built in Freeview and lives in a built up, urban area. She was missing a few Freeview channels so I've reset and retuned them. However, it's now missing even more channels that were previously working just fine! I seem to be able to get BBC 1, 2, 3, 4 etc, but ITV, Channel 4 and 5 are all missing, and no amount of resets and retunes are making them come back. On one of the tunings I did, I did manage to get ITV, Channel 4 and 5, but the BBC channels were all missing! Has anyone got any idea how to get them all back at the same time?

Many thanks.

M.
 
you got a good aerial ? Same on mine and im in urban area.

i can either get all of BBCs all of Chan 4s or all of ITVs but not at once... very frustrating.
 
Efour2 said:
you got a good aerial ? Same on mine and im in urban area.

i can either get all of BBCs all of Chan 4s or all of ITVs but not at once... very frustrating.
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I've no idea about the aerial; it's probably been there since the 70s or 80s whenever the first person who lived here had a TV! Do you think a booster may help?
 
Jokester said:
You're going to be better replacing the aerial I suspect, boosters tend to just amplify the noise as well.
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I'll tell my grandma that. She's in her mid 80s and is on her own so she relies heavily on the TV to pass the time so it needs to work perfectly for her.

Just had a look at the aerial and it's massive; it looks to be a good 5ft long and is raised quite high on a pole from the roof. I've no idea what makes a good aerial.
 
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Be the awesome grandson and get on the roof to give her a bigger areal (we had to upgrade years ago too). Everyone likes nice grandsons :)
 
I install aerials for a living. If the aerial is old then several things will have occurred which won't be helping your Gran's TV reception.

1) Aerials don't last forever. They corrode over time and lose efficiency

2) The aerial cable will be an old type poorly shielded cable that has aged and corroded at the terminals. That's a further loss in efficiency

3) It's likely that the cable will be quite tightly routed and even kinked in places. That acts as a notch filter and can actually block some channels completely

4) The aerial won't have a 75 Ohm balun. This makes it less sensitive, and seeing as digital is a bit "all or nothing" then on top of everything else that can make the weaker digital channels impossible to receive

5) Aerials move with wind and weathering. It's likely that the alignment has drifted a bit

6) The sensitivity of the digital tuner in a TV varies from brand to brand. She may have a TV that needs a bit more signal from the aerial to get all the channels.

One or two of these things on their own might not be enough to stop reception. But several combined and getting progressively worse will bring reception to a tipping point where you start to see the loss of the weaker channel groups. On the old analogue system there was quite a generous margin for error....the picture would just go a bit fuzzy but not disappear completely. Digital is less forgiving. The margin of error is far far smaller.

Boosters in a situation like this are a waste of money and time. The solution to all this is a new aerial and downlead. As long as there are no other issues such as problems with line of sight then this will restore full channel reception.
 
For some reason mine would be missing a few channels when I did an auto retune. But when I looked up the frequencies for the local transmitter and then did a manual tune every channel works perfectly
 
That sounds like a tuner sensitivity thing again. The signal level is a bit low for Auto Scan to pick up the weaker stations, but dialing in the frequency manually bypasses Auto Scan.
 
i'm having the same problem, my LG freeview can only pick HD channels but the cheap freeview box upstairs has no problems.
 
lucid said:
That sounds like a tuner sensitivity thing again. The signal level is a bit low for Auto Scan to pick up the weaker stations, but dialing in the frequency manually bypasses Auto Scan.
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Hmm. Strange though because I'm using a fairly new roof mounted wideband aerial and am only 8 miles from the Waltham transmitter.
 
No-One said:
Hmm. Strange though because I'm using a fairly new roof mounted wideband aerial and am only 8 miles from the Waltham transmitter.
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Look, all we can do is best guess based on the sometimes very limited info supplied in a post. So, based on the info you supplied in your first post in this thread, all you said was you were missing some channels but a manual input gave you some reception. Now you've started to fill in some of the blanks then other factors come in to play...

Waltham is running on reduced power because Digital Switch Over (DSO) is due to happen sometime this month. I think the latest estimate is Aug 31st. This means that the signal strength is low on the Digital channel bands. This ties in with what I said earlier - Low signal strength/tuner sensitivity.

If you also look at the channel allocation you'll see that two MUXes are at the bottom end of the frequency spectrum. This is when wideband aerial sensitivity is at its weakest. Again, this ties in with what I said about signal strength and tuner sensitivity.

You've got a new aerial, but that in itself doesn't guarantee anything. Your situation should improve though after DSO because the power can increase on the transmitter once the analogue stations are switched off.
 
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