That is probably two clicks down from 10 or 100 ie my 8/10.
The numbers I quoted are roughly true for Panasonic sets.
I find that they are worse than useless due to excessive granularity - there is no scope to optimise the aerial pointing with such crude measures 100 divisions instead of 10 would be a lot better.
Ah! That should please my mum - she was really upset when they canned it...
"Tropo" or "Sporadic E" usually occurs just as a settled high pressure moves off but the effects are normally of the hours/tens of hours duration.
I'd also expect this to manifest itself as blocky pictures, freezing, splats on sound etc rather than a simple "No Signal" for a second or three with no other effects. The OP isn't specific about no other effects though.
Think I'd go for a not 100% connector/connection somewhere. Works fine in the damp of winter but dries out and becomes intermittent in the heat of summer.
That is more likely to be a low grade LCD panel unable to do a full set of colours than anything else. There is no visible banding on any digital set I have ever owned.
There was a defect in MPEG on shallow angle lines on the previous generation of Panasonics that showed up in slow pans with visible linear sharp edge transitions - the coefficients were used inverted so that instead of anti-aliassing it generated a more ragged edge.
The full HD picture is stunning though you need a large set for it to be worthwhile. I generally watch via satellite now as the bitrate and quality is better than TDTV but sometimes the dish LNB misbehaves.
Leaves on the trees and/or heavy rain takes down my DAB radio and sometimes will be bad enough to degrade satellite reception too. Never had it affect TDTV signals to any noticeable extent - indeed loss of satellite due to heavy rain is the only time I watch via terrestrial.
May be you haven't got "your eye in" for digital/compression artifacts. B-) The grad banding is present on Freesat, The compression on Freeview may make a gentle grad a single colour. I've certainly seen the very weird effect of a talking head where the face as whole stays still but the eyes and mouth still move, apparently independantly of the rst of the face! Then there is the grass/crowd of a football match turning to mush when the camera pans then rebuilding the detail over a couple of frames when the pan stops. That's in addition to the jpeg splodgyness around captions.
Wanders off to check signal on Freview. The "quality" is maxed out on everything we can recieved (just the 3 PSB muxes), just the occasional loss of one block on the HD channels.
Unless your waay up North Martin thats usually caused by slight dish
*misalignment. I've only had a complete fade once that was some 5 years ago when it, whatever it was up there, took out every satellite receiver around even the 1.2 meter dish at the local radio station it looked like some alien manifestation a very very dark sky with some really black bits looked like they were rolling around with lightning flashing in and around it!....I don't know if Bill W is on channel to comment on that?..
The few times I watch any TV its on the Sony Bravia set and really if their doing their job right that the other end most all of the time its very good and certainly not a distraction at all .. or very rarely!...
We did have a sat receiver for a while that could get the German channels in HD and some of them, well lets say they know how to do broadcast engineering rather well still;)..
In article , Mentalguy2k8 scribeth thus
You need a better aerial by the sound of it and/or you Sky dish tweaking a bit perhaps.
However yesterdays antics were caused by an atmospheric disturbance.
You can see a prediction here..
Scroll over to Europe and this is a what's happening now depiction..
Which leads to quite some excitement in some quarters;!..
And the following from another forum and I'm sure the original author won't mind me showing it here..
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
At my house (roughly 6 miles from Winter Hill), it was mucking up my FreeView reception to the point where my Panasonic was saying "No FreeView signal is being received" on all the muxes. I thought that was pretty impressive going really, considering the proximity and power of Winter Hill!
My group C/D aerial was also pulling in something strong on channel 25, trampling all over my in-house CCTV channel.
Mother nature is a powerful beast when she wants to be...
Amen to that;)...
Not as much as I was. ;-)
I've seen that on very low data rate internet feeds, but not really on freeview.
It suggest to me that the sets you have are doing a piss poor job of interpolating data into the mpeg stream.
get yourself a PC dongle tuner, and see if the results are better. If they are, throw the TV away and get a better one.
Quite possible. The dish was installed by yours truly and worked well enough from the outset with a quick tuning aid that I never bothered to go back and optimise it completely. It has only ever dropped out when rainfall exceeds 1cm/hour or a massive electrical storm is overhead.
I am moderately way up north but it is only a problem a couple of times a year when we have thunderstorms of intergalactic proportions. Last ones of note took out the Newcastle metro and the A1 for a week or so.
I expect they did intentionally make their receivers small and cheap at the expense of having a more powerful transmitter on the bird. It also makes pointing easier as the beam is wider for a small dish.
Don't expect too much of picture quality though - it's around 1.1-1.6 Mbit video, 128kb Mp2 audio at 544x576.....
If it is all old stuff, that may not matter a lot.
Chris K
Her eyesight isn't what it was, so picture quality may not matter too much!
With drama, where things are generally under control, the 'old stuff' should still look pretty good. Sadly, much of it has suffered by being transferred from its original format by idiots.
Panasonic Viera ...
... 42" plasma I'd rather not. B-)
I've seen the same defects on other Freeview sets, they just squeeze things that little bit too much.
well sit further away. Or buy bluray
Plasma...
Most of the time I don't notice. It really stands out when the bands move, say on a slow fade on a sunset.
I generally only watch HD via satellite as it gives the best broadcast picture. Still loses a bit compared to being at work though, before any of the really hefty compression has got at the pictures. 10 Mbps HD over DSAT is about 150:1 compared to what comes out the back of a HD camera...
I find Freeview great on my 26" CRT TV in Epsom, but at the moment I am watching Freeview on a small digital TV in my B&B in Devon. The artifacts are like you describe - horrendous. So I think they are produced in the TV, having to drive a cheap 14" LCD display, 1280x800.
Haven't we got BlackRay yet ? :-)
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