TV aerial?

[tony sayer]

Not if rigged with a bit of care and thought into location. There're three of them here but you'd not notice them where they are;)...

[tony sayer]

What are you doing wasting time watching the idiots lantern when you could be out walking in that lovely area;?...

And reading good books too;)..

[tony sayer]

Yes nice place that, theres some pix here and a coverage map too...

[Adrian]

Oooh, you're going to make me go and do something to help myself, aren't you?

Right... There IS a small, seemingly-unlabelled box at the base of the aerial mast.

Aha. One of them - the aerial-side one - is a V23-100 Power Supply. The other - the inner one - is a V52-100 2-way Amplifier.

The aerial points the same basic direction as neighbours, which does appear to be the right basic direction for the Ridge Hill transmitter.

I thought I'd tried both, but you know what it's like when you're shouting instructions upstairs to SWMBO...

OK, so both on - 65-75% PSU for external on, internal off - 15-20% PSU for external on, internal disconnected from coax - 55-65% PSU for external off, internal on - 20-25% PSU for external disconnected from coax, internal on - 30% Both off - 10% Coax out of internal, to living room disconnected - 10%...

So it seems as if both are doing _something_, but the interesting thing is what happens with the internal one disconnected - it's almost as good as with it powered up, much better than connected but off. There's still no usable signal, though.

That's with the TV & STB downstairs. The STB's aerial socket won't connect to the co-ax before the Vision boxes, unless I start fannying with connectors. The co-ax comes out of the second box, and straight downstairs to the socket in the living room. I can't easily totally bypass both boxes, either.

[Adrian]

And that's why it's taken a month to plug the thing in.

[Martin Brown]

This ought to be enough to get a signal that might break up but should work after a fashion. All other permutations could be suffering from overload (as could this if there is a strong local signal inside the wide band of UHF & VHF that the mast head amplifier handles).

My instinct is that your mast head amplifier is already overloaded or defective and so the digital signal has in effect been scrambled.

You will probably need an adapter something like:

Maplins should have them too but higher price.

The other thing to try is a cheap and cheerful set top aerial

Ugly but seems to review OK and cheap. I just use a conventional external aerial and a pole when I need a portable TV aerial. YMMV.

Much easier than going up the chimney.

[Adrian]

Same results as with everything, though - it can search and find channels, but no actual usable signal. "Signal quality" still shows as 0%.

Less than a quid and a half, delivered...? Ordered!

[Java Jive]

Really, you need to take a look at the signal profile. It tells you all you need to know.

I would have thought your chances of getting Ridge Hill were almost zero, and at very best it would always be very unreliable, relying on refraction over hilltops. I would say that you need either Freesat or an aerial pointing at Clyro - it's only Freeview Lite (PSB muxes only), but it's a clear path.

What happens when you (double) click this link which I posted earlier. Does the page load and work, and if not, what browser are you using?

http://t> The aerial points the same basic direction as neighbours, which does

[tony sayer]

Could I suggest that you either take some pix of other aerials locally and your own aerial and post them somewhere. If you are not that happy with them being public about that mail them over.. discretion guaranteed..

And/or ask your nearest neighbours what their reception is like and have they had any troubles and as best they know is it now better or worse since DSO..?

It might be that something is overloading this setup or picking up something it didn't ought to and or its unstable and generating spurious signals over the TV spectrum..

[Graham.]

He clearly meant to say Freeview. How could Freesat be a replacement for Freesat?

[Windmill]

What 'quality' is being displayed by these things anyway? What are they measuring? Does anyone know, or is it a secret known only to the manufacturers?

[Windmill]

I've seen one tucked between two small shrubs in front of a low dividing wall in someone's front garden which didn't seem to me to be obtrusive, though that's a matter of taste and maybe I have none!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Bit error rates probably.

[Adrian]

Looking at OS maps and contour lines, it's 50/50 as to which is the clearer line, tbh. The Clyro transmitter's just the other side of a hill. OK, I imagine it pokes up over it, but Ridge Hill is a more or less straight line down the valley.

FF21 on Ubuntu 13.04

That comes up fully populated, but seems to be suggesting the Isles of Scilly as my most appropriate transmitter, 57 miles away. That's, umm, not quite right...

If I put my postcode in, click Submit, it comes back with zero for Lat & Long, and all bar World Place and Lat/Long are greyed out in the transmitter list. Same for a very different postcode.

[RobertL]

We have satellite but mainly because of the superior (to DAB) radio sound quality and the foreign stations.

Robert

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not here on FF21 on ubuntu/mint it don't.

Works OK on FF21 here.

maybe you have javascript disabled, or it needs java (iced tea plugin) to work.

[Adrian]

NoScript is installed, but I'm allowing scripts for his site.

Aha... After allowing that script, it then pops up with scripts from Ordnance Survey. Allow _those_ and it works. D'oh.

From the postcode, it comes back with Ridge Hill as both "nearest" and "likeliest", although it does list several relays as being geographically nearer - some I know will be non-starters for terrain.

[The Natural Philosopher]

This is at least progress.

OK, looking like that tx is all on low channel numbers, and closely spaced so a high gain antenna for that group is the one to have.

It ain't a huge amount of transmitter power mind you. Used to be 100KW for analogue, now only 20-KW..Mmm.

Googling around it looks like Ridge Hill is a toss up for the area around Hay on Wye, but Clyro is the one that works, BUT its only got a couple of MUXES.

Ok...

Thinking aloud here.

1/. You are not in a good place for freeview at all. Freesat may ultimately be a better bet. I know nothing about freesat, beyond its free, and uses satellites. 2/. If you do persist in Freeview, I think you probably can expect to be spending a fair bit of time exploring whether it will work or not. 3/. I suggest the following. (a) You have a PC with Ubuntu. So have I, so get a cheap Hauppage Nova USB TV tuner dongle, and install Kaffeine. And dvb-utils (b) experiment with the PC and various bits of wet string and aerials/cables boosters to see what works best. (c) If the machine is a laptop, you can even use it up a ladder, wiggling the aerial as you go (d) You SHOULD be able to get a high gain system mounted high pointing at Ridge Hill to do something. That's more expense for the aerial, to see, though. At which point freesat may seem a better option. (e) The clyro relay is strong enough so that it should 'break through' the back end of the high gain antenna and allow reception of that relay too, even though it would pointing almost directly way from it.

I suggest using the Hauppage because clunky though most DVB is on a PC, it aint half as clunky as a set top box and the hauppage stick I know works for me, and its cheap - 30 quid IIRC. And as laptop and USB stick is easier to at around to try outside, and plugged into different combinations of booster etc.

I've got one of those. an EyeTV for the wife's Mac and a couple of Sony STBS and a Samsung HDTV all plugged into the same distribution amp. There is nothing to choose between them when the signal quality goes bad. They all fail in the same way at the same time.

(when using USB sticks attached to Coax cables, ALWAYS use a USB extender lead between the stick and the computer. The sockets are not strong and you need to pretty much relieve the USB and coax sockets of any lateral strain cause by heavy cables. DAMHIKT :-))

I suggest Kaffeine because direct experience shows that in later Ubuntu, that is the easiest to use, and has its own inbuilt channel scan stuff. Other options that work reliably here are VLC, but uising a separate channels.conf file you have to cerate the hardway using DVB-utils and hand editing ITS 'hints' file from the transitter info, or Me-TV, which is also reasonably good at autoscanning. Gnome media player (totem) and gnome DVB simply didnt work for me.

As far as boosting/antenna selection goes, listen to Tony Sayer and Martin Brown, they are the people who have direct and relevant knowledge. BUT I THINK its true to say that MOST modern TVs and TV dongles are sensitive enough and low noise enough make boosting not that much use. ALL you gain IF you have a mast head amp is that you are moving the modern low noise amplification as close to the antenna as possible. So cable losses don't push the signal into the noise level of the tuner front end.

Having said that, it is likely to be a technical challenge : the quick route to a stable TV signal is to go freesat.

But I like technical challenges. And maybe you can end up becoming an aerial installer in Hay on Wye :-)

[Java Jive]

In order to keep the discussion focused on your problem, rather than my calculator page, please see below.

Ok, my earlier comment was based on you being somewhere in Hay-On-Wye, but it's so hilly around there that you wouldn't have to be very far outside it to get a very different result. As the official checker, now my own calculator, and the neighbouring aerials all agree on Ridge Hill, that is obviously the one to go for.

About the calculator page then ...

There are something like 20 -25 individual script(let)s on that page, but not all of them will be called, it depends on what choices you make.

You may think it would be better to have only one big one, but that has practicability and usability implications. For one thing, not all of them come from my server, some come from Google (for searching and maps), the tiles come from OS, etc, etc. For another, the resultant script would be huge, would likely affect performance on lower spec machines, and even if it ran, page loading would take so long that search engine rankings would suffer. In actual reality, by contrast, loading is staged, so that the calculator form unlocks and becomes usable as soon as possible, once the scripts to support calculation have loaded, and the others continue to load in the background while you are hopefully using the form to fill in the required data. If you watch carefully as the page loads you can see that, for example, that the receiver entry parts of the form become ungreyed, showing the form has unlocked ready for use, a little before the Google button appears, showing that the Google map script has loaded. This will be more obvious on first loading the page, so you might have to clear the cache to see the effect unambiguously.

If you simply had Javascript disabled, you'd see a section at the bottom of the page telling you that you need it, but I'm not sure what would happen with an add-on like NoScript. Again, you might think it would be better to put the section at the top, but unfortunately the way search-engine crawling works, it has to be at the bottom of the page, otherwise my page ranks unhelpfully high on terms like: "You need JavaScript to run this page", and rather lower on terms like: "TV Aerial Direction". Worse still, in response to the latter hits, the quoted piece of the page in the search engine results is often the contents of the tag, rather than something like: "This page helps you align a TV aerial".

I assure you that the page's design has had great deal of thought put into it, and it has been tested on many different browsers. Its weakest point is that was designed before mobile phones really started to take over in such a big way, and while it does work on mine, I would accept that it's a bit tricky to use on a mobile. I hope to improve that soon. However on a PC, even though I says it myself, I think it's pretty darned good.

[Java Jive]

I suspect that's more that most people would want to do to get a TV picture, but if the OP is willing ...

And Bill Wright, who is a professional aerial installer.

Yes, apropos of which ...

Adrian might find these pages helpful, but, please note Adrian, the Satellite Calculator page needs JavaScript just as much as the Terrestrial Calculator does! FYI, there are no advertising or other such scripts anywhere on my site, so there's no real reason to block any of it (scripts are either absolutely necessary, or else help make the page easier to read).