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All posts by Neil Robertson

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

N
Divis (Northern Ireland) transmitter
Tuesday 23 October 2012 11:33AM

Not really a question or comment but a little bit of news of what can be one with
a little bit of ingenuity and luck.

I live in Largs on the west coast of Scotland and we have been able to get a reasonable
(but not perfect) analogue picture from Divis provided we pointed our group A aerials in the right direction (I have a sea-path all the way although I am only about 30ft above sea-level). When we switched over to digital we were only provided with the usual 3 x multiplexes from our local relay (Rothesay) which gave us more channels than the 4 analogue
ones we had. There is no possibility of receiving the other multiplexes from a main station
due to topography.

Since my new Smart TV has USB record and will only record from terrestrial digital
and not from SCART/HDMI I wondered if I could get some extra channels from Divis
post-DSO which I could record.
I built (Yes-built) myself another Group A aerial and pointed it at Divis. This last week
has been really handy as I have been able receive both analogue and digital signals from
Divis. The analogue signals make it easy to align the aerial.

Today (1 day before switch-over) with my aerial in the roof-space I can get a noisy analogue signal from Divis (at 500KW) which would be almost watchable while the BBCA Multiplex (at 100Kw) is fine with no dropouts. Interesting that there is enough resilience
in the data stream to cope with this!

Tomorrow (post-DSO) I will find out if my plan to get more channels via the SDN ARQA
and ARQB multiplexes from Divis will work -these will be at 50Kw so they are 3db down
on the BBCA Multiplex

if my plans work out I will have digital TV on
Ch 21 Divis D3+D4
Ch 22 Rothesay BBC
Ch 23 Divis SDN
CH 24 Divis BBC B
Ch 25 Rothesay D3+D$
Ch 26 Divis ARQA
Ch 27 Divis BBC A
Ch 28 Rothesay BBC A
CH 29 Divis ARQB

This is something the frequency planners never foresaw - will the tuner cope?

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