(Slightly) OT: Digital TV Qs

Being a Virgin cabled customer, I've not had any call to use the RF feed to the telly for years. However, finally gave in to sprogs pestering to get his TV working, and rewired the feed to his room. Our antennae is set to point to a relay station about 2Km away, and I haven't repointed it. We're now getting (according to the TV) a 50% signal strength on most channels. The picture quality seems fine, and sound is OK too. But the strange thing is his TV manages to pick up "Dave", whereas our main one goes from Channel 16 to 23, no Dave. I returned it 3 times, but it can't find channel 19.

I'm not to fussed - main TV has the V+ box, and sprog can get Dave, which is one of his favourite channels, so it's a non-issue, but I'm curious.

Also, is 50% a bad strength ? Clearly the TV is happy with it, but what sort of threshold are we working within ? Presumably 50% is not good enough for any HD channels ?

Reply to
Jethro
Loading thread data ...

Your son has a TV equipped with a DVB-C tuner?

Reply to
Terry Casey

Not 100% into the specs etc, but here it is :

formatting link

Reply to
Jethro

your son's TV has a slightly more sensitive tuner and/or a lower loss cable run than the main set.

Reply to
airsmoothed

His run is 15m, the main TV is 3 ! However I must admit LG is a known brand, whilst our main TV is unbranded (courtesy of eBuyer 2 years ago !). Anyway doing some research today, I can see that the (loft mounted) aerial is actually pointing to the Sutton Coldfield transmitter, whereas the nearest transmitter is actually Brierly Hill. Unfortunately that's a 60degree left turn, which means the mounting needs to go the other side of the upright.

My main Q is the 50% though ... I must admit that I'm surprised at the quality.

Reply to
Jethro

Most digital coding schemes mean that the picture quality will stay good until a fairly low RF level, at which point the picture quality will degrade pretty rapidly.

Reply to
airsmoothed

main TV, so your like-for-like comparison implied you'd given your son another VM feed. DVB-C is the CATV DVB spec, as opposed to DVB-T (Terrestrial - aka Freeview) and DVB-S (Satellite - aka Freesat, Sky, etc.)

However, his 'TV' turns out to be a video monitor which is unable to receive any kind of television signal without external assistance, yet you said "his TV manages to pick up Dave ... " and so on.

Confused of Ilford

Reply to
Terry Casey

The monitor has a tuner - "This LG 19=94 widescreen LCD monitor boasts unbeatable versatility. With an array of connectivity options for media devices like DVD player, game console, camcorder, and music=97plus a built-in Digital Tuner to display HD broadcasts=97."

Reply to
airsmoothed

50% of what? These percentage figures from TVs and set-top boxes are pretty meaningless, other than as an arbitrary scale for peaking your aerial. A more meaningful guide is to see how much attenuation you can insert in the antenna lead before reception starts to fail. If that's less than 6 dB your signal is somewhat marginal, if more than 10 or 12 dB then it's likely to be adequate.
Reply to
Andy Wade

Component Video D-Sub HDMI Composite Video Input/Output SCART

Not a whiff of RF ...

Even More Confused of Ilford

Reply to
Terry Casey

And that is the only mention anywhere that I can see - so is it Cable, Terrestrial or Satellite ...?

Reply to
Terry Casey

In message , Terry Casey writes

The LG website tends to be a bit rubbish IME. It comes with a built in Freeview tuner.

It says HD in that blurb, but I'm not convinced it is. We have a similar model of TV/Monitor from LG and that doesn't do Freeview HD. I suspect that they mean it will display HD content from DVD etc.

Reply to
chris French

Having used it once, I think that "tends to be a bit" could be simplified to "is" ...

Reply to
Terry Casey

He's had the thing 2 years now (blush). I was sure it had the Freeview logo on the box, but the actual TV doesn't. However, as I said, plugging the RF lead in, from the newly installed digital aerial (with booster) seems to give access to all the Freeview channels. Dave (Top Gear) and BBC (family Guy) being the ones he's particularly into atm.

I'm a little bit fuzzy about digital TV - my knowledge of TV networks stops at single sideband suppressed carrier. But then presently we've got cable, and don't watch that much TV, so I don't need to know too much.

Reply to
Jethro

In message , Jethro writes

Mine doesn't either.

Reply to
chris French

Analogue TV is vestigial sideband, complete with carrier!

You are thinking of SSB as used for speech communication and widely used by amateurs or, at least, it used to be ...

Reply to
Terry Casey

it was 25 years ago !

Reply to
Jethro

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.