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All posts by Chris.SE

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

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Clacton (Essex, England) Freeview Light transmitter
Monday 6 August 2018 11:25PM
Cheddar

Briantist:

Clacton is no longer a "Light" transmitter as of 1st August, it now broadcasts the 6 main muxes.

PSB1(BBCA) - UHF32; PSB2(D3&4) - UHF34; PSB3(BBCB HD) - UHF45; SDN - UHF40; ARQA - UHF43; ARQB - UHF46. 400W for each Mux. Aerial group K, Horizontal.

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Sudbury (Suffolk, England) Full Freeview transmitter
Monday 6 August 2018 11:48PM
Cheddar

Briantist: and anyone else reading, for the sake of clarity as of the 1st August, the muxes at Sudbury are as follows -

PSB1(BBCA) - UHF44; PSB2(D3&4) - UHF41; PSB3(BBCB HD) - UHF47; SDN - UHF29; ARQA - UHF31; ARQB - UHF37. All Muxes 100kW each. Aerial group K is better, Horizontal.

DigitalUK indicate no further channel changes are planned.

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Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Monday 6 August 2018 11:58PM

tony morrissey:

Sometimes, after a set has been retuned several times, its memory map is a bit "disjointed". It's often best to do a factory reset/do a retune with the aerial unplugged to clear the memory of all channels and then do a new tune with the aerial plugged back in. However if you are now getting satisfactory reception on all muxes, I would leave well alone until/if further issues arise ;)

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Martin:
According to the postcode you submitted on another post, you may get the most reliable reception from a
Sudbury repeater at Rouncefall (check your DigitalUK predicted reception). Your comments in your post here suggest that the engineer that did your "retune" is not familiar enough with local reception issues since the recent transmitter retunes that have taken place. Either that or he didn't advise you appropriately.
The "problem" with your reception issues from Bluebell Hill are most likely due to interference from other transmitters as more transmitters are now sharing these channels.

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Martin:
I replied to your post on the Bluebell Hill transmitter page where I said -
"According to the postcode you submitted on another post, you may get the most reliable reception from a
Sudbury repeater at Rouncefall (check your DigitalUK predicted reception). Your comments in your post here suggest that the engineer that did your "retune" is not familiar enough with local reception issues since the recent transmitter retunes that have taken place. Either that or he didn't advise you appropriately.
The "problem" with your reception issues from Bluebell Hill are most likely due to interference from other transmitters as more transmitters are now sharing these channels."

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Winter Hill (Bolton, England) transmitter
Tuesday 28 August 2018 12:10AM

js: Have you been in touch with Arqiva as I previously suggsted? I'd be interested in their response.

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Hannington (Hampshire, England) transmitter
Monday 10 September 2018 11:21PM

Darren: Well that's good news, let's hope it remains stable, save a whole lot of hassle.

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All: A reminder of my post on Tuesday, 6 March 2018 at 3.55pm on p171 where towards the end of the post I summarised the current mux allocations and where to look for details of changes at DigitalUK.

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Paul Dicken:

I'm not really sure what Nick is on about. As MikeP has already said, Sudbury is predicted to give you very good reception for your postcode, whereas the Woodbridge repeater is predicted to be poor for your postcode due to the terrain but further more it only has the 3 PSB muxes, Sudbury is a main transmitter with all 6 muxes (it doesn't have and probably never will have COMs 7&8 - nor are they mentioned by DigitalUK - they will disappear in any event by 2022).
As for aerial, if your site is good, ie. no very local obstructions from trees or buildings and good height on your chimney then a log36 should do the job and has less wind resistance than the other choice which is a Yagi 18K.
If you are technically minded, a good site for information on TV aerials is A.T.V : Poles, Brackets, Clamps and TV / FM / DAB Aerials

Also Dale Rumbold:
The changes in April-June 2019 that MikeP has mentioned are minor reception changes for the SDN and ArqA muxes. This will be due to other transmitters changing frequency and using the same UHF channels.

nick horrex: Are most of your Freeview boxes not DVB-T2 capable? Nothing will change before 2020 and I would guess things will only start to be phased in sometime around 2022 so you've bags of time to save some pennies ;)


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nick horrex:

DigitalUK's postcode checker - using the detailed view - is generally quite accurate and it's predictions are based on a 100m square for a given postcode (the number of houses covered by a postcode will vary from postcode to postcode). Looking at the local terrain using the tool available on this site, Paul Dicken's postcode has a very local hill between him and the Woodbridge repeater which is why prediction for that is very poor to non-existent reception, whereas there is line of sight to Sudbury.

Without looking at an OS map (for which I don't have time) I don't know how many hills there are in that area but as I'm sure you know, "high gain" aerials and stacked arrays were often used in analogue days to reduce or eliminate ghosting due to there greater directivity etc. I had precisely that problem where I used to live, whereas now with the digital signals a simple yagi does the job fine. In that particuler area a lot of houses are using a local repeater (with only the 6 + local muxes) whereas others use the main transmitter (all muxes) as digital reception is fine. Hence looking at (newish shiney - not old) immediately local aerials can only be used a rough guide to reception.

At Paul Dicken's postcode, if most of the new very local aerials are high gain, I'd probably consider the Yagi as the 3 PSB muxes at on UHF 41,44,47 although a Log36 will do a better job of rejecting impulse interference and only has slightly lower gain over the band.

As regards reception changes next year, if you look on DigitalUK at all the transmitters that are listed to change channels during April to June, you will find the information.

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