The trouble with newsgroups is that the OP can't differentiate between the one or two people who know what they're talking about and the rest. The 'TV aerial' discussion includes many responses that are given in an authoritative manner yet are total hogwash. Buried amongst these are one or two that actually make sense.
Bill
We had a hell of a storm this afternoon. See
To my surprise there have been no reports yet of system failures. It was quite late in the day though, and local councils etc are not renowned for the speed of their response. It's very unpredictable, the effect of lighting storms. I've had both extremes of surprise many times.
Bill
Well, you can always fwck off somewhere else then. The fact that people are willing to try and help and give their advice for free, should mean that people have to accept some of it is good and some not so good. There's far more than one or two that make sense in the TV aerial thread.
You can of course, go and pay a professional for advice, but if you come here for free advice then stop complaining about it. I suppose you're also unhappy with your *free* newserver.
Its the same as asking in the local pub, except you don't even get to see who you are asking. It has been since the public were allowed (well access made so easy they could) internet access. Its the reason you start by ignoring GG.
As the (yes, totally inexpert on this subject) OP, I can only say "Thank you for stating the bleedin' obvious".
Welcome to any kind of "un-official" and un-moderated support resource. NAHAY?
If you think some of the responses are bollocks, then here's a suggestion
- REPLY TO THEM. Say why you think they're bollocks. If others disagree, maybe a sensible conversation can result in which either everybody merges and agrees or a consensus emerges as to what's bollocks and what's not.
Just, please, don't sit on the edge and whine about it. That's really not very helpful at all.
Is that not par for the course for most unmoderated NG. It certainly is for this one as it seems to have very poor signal to noise and in many cases seems to serve more as a local chat group than a useful source of info (and if read in that light can be very entertaining :-)) . There was a post a couple of weeks ago about using credit cards to buy fuel in the USA - there must have been close on 50 follow ups but only 3 or 4 of them were about the original question. Most replies were whining on about the design of software for buying stuff off the web - all doubtless very true but of no use at all to the OP.
It seems par for the course that on almost every thread someone will post a reply and someone else will say that they are talking tosh.
Sorting the good from the bad seems to take some time (but does raise some smiles along the way)
Hmm, well the problem was also that the person seems unsure of that was in the house and where and what it was doing.
There are times when its pointless to attempt to get stuff to work of course as the history of it is steeped in mystery. Brian
+1 and if you think that its just usenet, and that paid for support is any better...let us travel back in time to my first Unix install. Interactive Unix 386 on a PC circa 1993
"Hello, is that interactive Unix UK technical support" "yes, Dis is interactive Unix UK support" "I am trying to install the product and it gets as far as ...XXXXX and then just hangs" "Oh, Sir de BIOS she is incompatible Sir: I cannot help you" .... have coffee, note time, look at box, dial USA. Should be early morning in California
"Hello, is that Interactive Unix technical support" Spaced out west coast drawl suggestive of many late night bongs.
"Sure is,how may I help you?" " I am trying to get the product to install, it gets so far and then freezes" "Oh, OK what is the last thing on screen before it does?" "XXXXX"
Silence apart from remote tapping of keys.
"Hello are you still there?" "sure, sorry dude I was looking through the installation script: Does the motherboard have a maths coprocessor?". "I don't think so" "Well the place its hung is because it went looking for one, and I guess if it didn't find one, it looks like it would actually stay looking forever" "So the BIOS is incompatible" "Hell no! There will be a jumper on the board that you need to change if the coprocessor isn't there, then we won't go looking for it. But it shouldn't hang if it doesn't find it. I'll fix that for the next relaease' "YOU will fix it??" "Yeah, I wrote the installation script" The following day I took the PC to the man who had built it for me and explained 'Oh right, yes, there is a jumper. We never bother with it because Windows never uses the coprocessor anyway, so we don't supply em with the coprocessors : hang on" removed jumper with tweezers "that should do it,"
And it did.
"The BIOS she is Incompatible", uttered in a thick Indian accent, became our in joke meaning "I haven't a clue, and I don't want to talk to you. This is a convenient excuse".
Quality of support is not correlated with how much you paid for it.
Three times in my support career, I phoned SUN, Interactive Unix, and Cisco directly in the USA and each time I got through directly to THE GUY THAT WROTE THE SOFTWARE and got problems resolved that had stumped the 'paid' support line in the UK.
You should thank your stars for Usenet. And the Web. I once spent a morning in the loal university bookshop and spent £50 on an book simply because it had, as an example, "how to get a parallel printer working on SUN solaris system V printing"
It was a line of about 140 characters. I paid £50 for that line, took the book back, typed it in, and the bugger worked.
I don't think we ever used that book again.
These days you type a query into google and back comes 50 answers and usually at least one is actually correct.
It's cheaper.
That is Usenet. Love it or hate it.
You will always get
- people who have actually done it themselves, saying exactly how they did it, with the caveat that YMMV
- people who have done something not very like it, but chip in anyway
- people who have never done it, but read about it somewhere and to whom there is only One True Way of doing it.
- people who want to sell you something, or be noticed, who will tell you any shit to achieve that end.
- people who simply like to thinkabout how things are done, in a theoretical way. Even if they have no direct experience. Sometimes they are way off. Sometimes they come up with interesting approaches.
- people who have nothing better to do than chatter idly.
The point is, that life is no different than that. Usenet is simply a subset of people who can use computers and have discovered a more arcane method of communication than 'twitter' Learning how to deal with the 'noise' is excellent experience for life in general.
The OP came looking for help with a specific problem. This is Usenet. Any advice given here for nothing is worth exactly what you paid for it.
Apart from the claim of 4G interfering with Freesat and windmills causing dynamic multipath distortion[*] I didn't see too much wrong. The main problem initially was getting the OP to define his problem clearly enough to be able to offer sensible advice.
[*] they might but probably not as badly as in the USA. The US never mind the quality feel the width approach has severe multipath problems.If you think *YOU* can do better then by all means post corrections don't start a new thread whinging that free help is somehow no good!
You might want to check out Bill's website:
Guilty as charged.
But I now know a big chunk more than I did two days ago.
That's not Bill's website, though I believe he was a major contributor to that site. Bill's website is:
I think you'll find they're one and the same...
So they are, now, but they didn't used to be.
The URL I gave was genuinely for Bill's website. The one you gave was for an informal organisation called "Professional Aerial Riggers Against The Sharks", and its contents aimed to give punters free advice about DSO to avoid them being conned into buying "digital aerials" or being persuaded that they would have to subscribe to $ky.
I don't know what has happened to PARAS. Perhaps, now that DSO is over, it was thought to have outlived its usefulness, but I can foresee it being needed again wrt 4G.
Perhaps Bill might care to expla>
I know that, but it made the point I wanted to make.
Might also be worth having a look at:
Since this includes what should hopefully be reasonable quality information. (if Bill would like to give it a once over and comment, it would be much appreciated since it has changed a bit since the last time he looked at it)
The PARAS URL has been pointing to Bill's site for a while but now, possibly in the lifetime of this thread, it is now pointing at
It's been switched in the last 11 hours and 59 minutes...
So those who doubt Bill's credentials should have a look at
You do realise that argument by authority is a fallacy, don't you?
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