I'm not convinced a booster will help much with a decent telly and aerial
- unless the cable run is very long. It may have done once when TV tuners were way less than state of the art. But I'd be surprised if they were now.
I'd make sure the aerial is in good nick and suitable, and a good quality downlead is used. The latter can deteriorate in service.
Yes, I wondered about what was happening there. But that'd require plasterboard excavation, and I'm not (yet) ready for that.
But that doesn't stop you plugging your tv into the amp directly for diagnostic purposes surely or would that involve carrying a TV into the loft?
Tim
OK. I don't know how sensitive the LG tuner is, but if it is anything like the Panasonics I have encountered it will be an order of magnitude more sensitive today than an early set top box.
Q: Does the old Humax still work OK with the signal now? It is always possible that disturbing the connectors has added a break in the line.
Even so I am surprised that with a current generation set you need all of these extra amplifiers complicating the system.
Thick walls and chicken wire in the plaster won't help but you should try running a clean trusted RF coax lead from the TV back to where the signal first enters the house. If there is a mast head amplifier then its PSU will also need to be in circuit but you need to exclude all other house wiring with unknown splitters and loads lurking on it.
Pulling the socket frontplate off in the main bedroom, right next to the amps, shows that that socket is straight 1-to-1 with one of the outputs on the internal amp - the -14db one. The other doesn't appear to be a straight 1-to-1 to the living room socket (the nearest), but it'll take some excavation to see what's what. There's a small bit of floorboard that might come up, right next to the amps.
OK, so drag the TV upstairs, and swap the internal amp outputs over, so the TV is 1-to-1 into the non--14db output.
BANG! 100% signal strength, 100% signal quality on all muxs, even the ones I wasn't getting a sausage on. 'erselfs beloved ITV3 is there - that "Vacuous at Heart" safari-shit is on, but we can't have everything.
Swap it back again, drag the TV back downstairs. Plug it all in...
100% everywhere again...WTF?
Obviously a loose connection somewhere - yet, remember, I was getting
50%/100% on some of the muxs before, and futtling with the amps made a difference - so there must've been SOME connection...Thanks, folks, for all your help - even if it was mainly kicking me to understand what's there better.
And it appears I don't.
Now that I've got 100% everywhere, I've taken the internal amp out of the equation again. And one mux - ch27 - has gone down to 98% strength, 100% quality - but the rest are still hard on 100%/100%...
I won't take the PSU for the external out - apart from anything else, I can't easily connect the cables together. I seem to remember from the other thread that I did order a male-to-male connector, but I'm buggered if I know where it's gone over the last two years...
BTDTGTTS
RF at almost gigahertz frequencies is happy to jump sub millimetre gaps with SOME attenuation less than infinity...
fiddling with cables and espeacily belling lee connectors often helps
I get around 60% strength and still get 100% quality
Yes. The quality metric is really quite binary at about 20% strength it falls off a cliff here and you get Picasso cubist rendition followed by no signal. It would be better to know the error rate on a log scale.
En el artículo , Adrian escribió:
A fractured droplead (from the aerial wall socket to the TV) is common.
In article , Adrian scribeth thus
Somewhere around the western coverage area of this one next to a small relay wasn't it?...
Right on the line, yep.
The small relay we're not far from is Clyro - I didn't know there was a Kington one. That's just as near, but the other side of what's locally known as the "mountain".
Clyro only transmits the very basic muxs, and is the other side of the border into Wales, so transmits S4C rather than Ch4, AIUI.
Agree If terrestial TV reception depends on big aerials and amplifiers there is a lot to be said for going over to satellite, Freesat boxes are very cheap now ( or use a 2nd hand Sky one) and a satellite dish installed at low level ( if possible) easy to repair.
Not a lot of use then Boyo!. I suspect with a decent aerial you'll receive Ridge hill all Group A OK where you are unless theres some stonking big object in the way. Sounds as if the internal wiring isn't quite what it might/ought be..
replying to Adrian, Kevin Prescott wrote: Downstairs did you refit the wall socket or connect it straight to the PSU...Isolated TV Sockets won't let voltage pass through them..An isolated socket will have resisters on the circuit board..
replying to Robert, Kevin Prescott wrote: Freesat is an option depending on how many tv's and freesat boxes you'll have to buy and some people get confused with 2 remotes and switching to HD sources and if you need high masts (poss due to trees) you might have a problem picking the Astra signal..Replace everything with CAi benchmarked equipment and look online for other relay transmitters near you which you could go for(normally less channels)..
replying to Dave Plowman (News), Kevin Prescott wrote: A masthead Amplifier with a bad BER rate and carrier to noise reading will just make it alot worse...It just amplifies all the unwanted noise etc..The most important thing is gettingthe best BER and C/N you can directly of your aerial, if they are above average/goodish readings then the Amp will do its job correctly but it can only amplify the signal whats going into it...
What's a 'BER rate'?
Ah, I see. RAS syndrome.
Step away from your brain-dead web front-end, and look at the dates things have been posted.
I was just thinking this. If one thing needs to be done on wherever that interface to the web is, its to indicate the history of a topic. It might also be a good idea to do as some forums do, close a thread when its old so only if a new thread is started is there any possible followup so to speak.
Personally, if anyone is interested after all this time, masthead amps suffer very badly from strong signals out of band, and tend to intermodulate the wanted signals with weird stuff, or create completely false transmissions due to non linearity. They are only any good miles from anywhere. Brian
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