OT; Freeview

[Andy Burns]

No, it needs an aerial (and before 2012 you'd need a different one from the old one you're likely to have).

[Andy Burns]

Know of any neighbours that have got freeview working, or tried and failed?

Is your street full of satellite dishes? Cue smart-arse remarks ....

[David WE Roberts]

Just skimmed this and I wasn't sure I'd seen a clear answer.

Just to add to the confusion, and assuming this isn't some kind of complicated troll.......

Terrestrial broadcast TV comes from yer TV transmitter towers.

Different channels are broadcast a different frequencies, and with analogue TV you get one channel per frequency.

To avoid interference between different TV transmitter towers the same channels (e.g BBC1, BBC2) are transmitted on different frequencies from different towers.

To further avoid interference the TV aerial on your roof (or in the loft etc.) is designed to only receive a sub-set of the available frequencies and is selected to match your local transmitter. The different aerials are assigned different letters e.g. Band A, Band E.

With digital TV the same total range of frequencies are used, but some frequencies are now assigned to 'digital multiplexers' so that several channels can be carried on a single frequency. This means more (but not necessarily better) channels. Until analogue switch off the digital channels will be transmitted along side the analogue channels.

This means that your aerial now has to be able to receive more (and/or different) frequencies.

In some cases your old aerial will be fine.

In other cases your old aerial will only receive some (or in I think fairly rare cases none) of the frequencies carrying the new digital multiplexed signal. Also, in some regions with poor signal coverage (such as my local one) there are 'repeaters' sited locally which re-transmit the signal. However these are not full transmitters and certainly the one in our local car park only re-transmits the analogue channels. Again in my case the aerials are a dead give away - not long pointy things but just a flat rack at right angles to the signal. If this applies in your case you are either completely shafted or you need a new aerial.

Although banded aerials are still fine in most cases, installers tend to sell and install huge new aerials with X shaped arrays and a couple of oven racks welded to the back. A bit like a cross between a SciFi ray gun and a BBQ.

If you look at adjacent roofs and see new shiny aerials (often with gold bits) which are far larger and spankier than yours then you should be in an area which receives digital TV.

Put your postcode in

and it should tell you which aerial you need and where to point it.

So to summarise that lot - analogue and digital TV come down the same aerial.

Your TV has additional inputs to connect extra devices such as DVD players, cable boxes, games consoles etc. From what you post you have only one additional device - the Virgin box - so all your other inputs will show that nothing is connected. Assuming that you use a SCART cable for your Virgin box (I know that some old boxes had a TV tuner and used that to send a signal down the TV aerial alongside the analogue channels) then you have not tuned in Virgin - you have merely connected the cable to an input and you see the output from the Virgin cable box when you select that input.

On the positive side, there isn't much (if anything) on Freeview which is not also available on your Virgin box so the worst that can happen is that you have a new capability in your new TV that you don't really need. Given that all new TVs have to have a Freeview tuner included, you would be in the same position with any new TV. So you have something new which potentially you can't use but you aren't really disadvantaged in any way.

HTH

Dave R

[Graham.]

And not get his commission?

[Harry Bloomfield]

Tim Watts explained :

On our Samsung of late last year....

I do sometimes manage to get it accidently on the analogue channels and the quick way back to digital, is to type in high channel number (which exists), such as 38 which is Quest on the digital channels.

[Harry Bloomfield]

After 2012 you will be limited to those above choices. We (currently) receive all of the analogue, all of the Freeview and (a none Sky sat system) gets us 200+ FTA channels, some of which are HD - all fed in via the HDMI socket.

I'm not sure what happens to the three of our sets with built-in Freeview, once the much advertised HD starts to be transmitted.

[Harry Bloomfield]

The 'no connection' ones can only be selected when a source is plugged into them.

[Harry Bloomfield]

David WE Roberts wrote on 08/05/2010 :

Just to try to enlarge on that...

In some areas the original single band antenna might be all that is needed, if all of the digital muxes are transmitted within that band. In other areas where it is not, to enable all of the digi channels to be received, a wide or wider band antenna will be required.

A second and separate problem is that the digi signal is much weaker than the analogue, so sometimes an antenna with more gain (bigger, more complex) might be required.

Once analogue is turned off, the digi signal strength is supposed to be increased.

So basically - all of these antenna installers advertising new digi compatible antennas are wrong. The digi antenna is identical to the analogue one. The only difference is perhaps wider band and perhaps more gain. If neither are needed, your old analogue antenna is fine.

Ours was fine, but 20+ years old - so I fitted a new higher gain antenna and a modern downlead.

[The Medway Handyman]

I'm now informed by SWMBO that we have a Freeview box in the granddaughters room and that SIL just around the corner has Freeview installed.

Hmmmm!

[The Medway Handyman]

We have a Virgin cable going into the Virgin box and a aerial cable going into the TV.

[John]

It won't "tune" all the stuff from the Virgin box - that will be connected by either Scart or maybe HDMI (dunno, we've got Sky not Virgin) so will be a selectable input on the telly such as AV1, AV2 etc. Try disconnecting the V box and just tune the TV using the terrestrial aerial.

[D.M.Chapman]

It's not quite that simple :)

There are several options:

Freeview (was itv digital): transmitted like the old analogue setup, but at a much lower power and limited coverage. From where you are, if you can see bluebell hill you'll be ok. You might also be able to get something from across the water. You'll have to wait till 2012 for this to get much better.

FreeSat: similar, but transmitted via Satellite (and despites skys attempt to confuse, nothing to do with Sky). Free, but you need a dish and a receiver. Has the advanatage of some HD available (not a lot yet but...). You've probably seen the receivers as B&Q appear to be trying to shift millions of Ross branded ones and have them stacked all over the place ;-)

FreeSat by Sky: Subtly different from FreeSat (grrrr). This is provided by Sky and appears to be their attempt to cash in on the confusion. A one off payment to sky gets you going (and gets you an endless amount of offers from Sky to "upgrade" to their full service). No HD AFAIK, sky like to charge extra for that. More channels - not convinced they include anything worth watching though...

have a bit more info. It seems to have been made deliberately confusing (thanks Sky).

Still, given you mention Cable, if you have virginmedia sub already, why do you need the free{view,sat} option at all? If the TV is to be connected to the V box then just use that and forget the rest. Pretty much nothing that is available on the other options isn't available on Virgin (+ you get the video on demand stuff).

If it's a V+ box (ie, you can record) then get yourself a HDMI cable (Virgin will send you one, but if you want it before the next ice age Wilko or Asda or similar will do you one for a few quid - don't pay a fortune. Fiver will do). HD on virgin is *not* charge as an extra Sub unlike Sky.

If you don't have a V+ box, and don't want one then you might be interested in the new V HD box. It's a one off charge (50 quid?) and replaces your existing V box but gives you free access to the HD channels and HD on demand on your existing contract. Would let you use your HD telly in HD mode :-)

Does that help or have I just confused even more? :)

Darren

[D.M.Chapman]

Urghhhh.... worst case (you sure you don't have a scart lead as well? :)

I'm assuming this is Virgin digital and not the ancient analogue service (I think that's been turned off but...)

If so, then a scart lead will be an improvement and if you make sure it's one will all the pins connected will enable the TV to autoswitch to the correct input when the V box is turned on. Then you don't need to worry about the telly at all, just turn on the virgin box and the telly will switch fine.

Darren

[Harry Bloomfield]

D.M.Chapman was thinking very hard :

FreeSat carries BBC HD, ITV HD and one maybe two more HD channels at the moment. ITV HD was until recently mostly just transmitting an ID card, except for special programs. They now transmit most, if not all of the time now - usually ITV 1. We use not a Freesat system at home, but a general purpose multi-sat HD one with a HDD to record to. We get

200+ un-encoded channels just on the one Astra satellite. Away in the caravan we use a similar, but not HD system able to run on 12v.

Both beat Freeview by a long way and in the caravan it provides almost guaranteed reception whether their is a local terrestrial transmitter or not.

[T i m]

So is that two statements? Or maybe the TV mixes all the channels together no matter what their source?

So, the Virgin cable goes into the Virgin cable box and then connects to the TV (how).

It may just be terminology but when you said " its picked up the terrestrial channels and tuned all the cable stuff from the Virgin box" but I can't see what the telly has to do with 'tuning' the Cable box unless you are feeding the TV via a pass though UHF (TV aerial lead) though the cable box (and as DMC says, not a 'nice' solution).

Then it would 'tune' to the modulated-RF output of the cable box (any channels that were on the cable itself plus the one channel the cable box itself is set to AND any channels that are coming from the external aerial etc. As the signal that may be coming (straight) through the cable box (rather than digitally decoded out of it) are going to be analogue, maybe the TV is only seeing analogue and 'missing' the Freeview channels?

Experiment for you then. 'Just' have the aerial plugged into the TV and have a 'tune' and see what it finds?

(Assuming I haven't got it all wrong etc). ;-)

This is what I think it should be:

What you describes sounds like it could be:

Cheers, T i m

[dennis]

8<

The sales guy sold him a TV that will work with either analogue or freeview. He didn't sell him a freeview box to use in a non freeview area so what's the problem? The only other thing he could have done is sell him a freesat TV to give him a second digital source to go with Virgin. Blaming the sales guy for selling the TV is just wrong in this case.

[Alan]

That post code is 6 miles from Bluebell Hill (requiring a Wideband aerial) and with a clear line of site to the transmitter.

Enter your postcode into

Wolfbane site gives a compass bearing and distance to the transmitter.

If you click on the link in the Wolfbane results table (table heading OS grid ref) you will get a diagram of the terrain between you and the transmitter.

You need a Postscript viewer to see the picture. A small utility can be downloaded from

older version 5.3 is 350kbytes and is free - see link in the opening page. This older version is OK for viewing the Wolfbane picture.

If the file from Wolfbane downloads as txpath.exe just rename it to txpath.ps before opening it in RoPS.

[dennis]

8<

You buy an external freeviewHD box. It would appear that the UK has decided to use a system which there are no software upgrades for existing DTV sets and there probably can't be.

[The Natural Philosopher]

MAY bne required. you may have sub optimal signal strength, but it will still work.

These days, its not that much weaker. The digital muxes are now almost up to full power at most transmitter sites.

I am not sure the two are correlated. Cetrainly my local transmitter (Sudbury) has shown significant increases in signal strength on the digital channels abd the analogue are still being transmitted.

No, it typically has a broader bandwidth and possibly slightly different polarisation. Or that may be as a result of different design to get the broader bandwidth.

The only difference is perhaps wider band and perhaps more

Mine was just fine anyway. Had some issues on breakup under adverse atmospheric conditions on some muxes, but since the power has gone up, they have gone too.

Multipath is a tad more critical.

[Andy Burns]

At the time I plugged the address into the postcode checker, I didn't know what transmitter served the area, but it seemed adamant that there was no prospect of coverage.

Yes, I figured that out later, the terrain map on google didn't *look* like there was anything in the way ...

Amazed wolfbane still farts about like that ...