Better reception?
I wouldnt bet on that - the receivers on a lot of the boxes are so shit they will overload.
At least you can just point the arial a bit of target if you know what you're doing.
London's analogue TV signal was silenced at midnight yesterday, paving the way for 4G mobile data networks in the nation's capital. The analogue signal was transmitted from the Crystal Palace station now owned by Arqiva, which runs the UK's terrestrial broadcasting system after a previous government flogged it off. Crystal …
Nope, the old DTV powers were roughly 17dB down on analogue. Post DSO powers are typically 6-10dB down (pretty much on all sites) - that was the whole point of DSO - switch off the high power analogue and you free up spectrum to increase digital powers.
Also, directly comparing analogue radiated powers with digital to establish coverage areas is not a good idea. Digital can work with much lower strengths than analogue. If you need proof of this just look at the radiated powers in the analogue system for analogue sound, and NICAM digital sound. The NICAM carrier powers were around 1/10 of the analogue power, yet NICAM could still give solid reception when both vision and analogue audio were very noisey and starting to fail.
However, as another poster has pointed out, the biggest problem for some people now will be too much signal, overloading all those cheap and nasty freview boxes. This is particulary so for those who have installed high gain "digital" aerials and amplifiers. It's been a problem in other parts of the country, and it's effect is for some channel to be missing completely and is difficult for people to diagnose correctly. At least with analogue, overloading was fairly self evident from floating pictures in the background.
Ah didn't realise. The article I read must have had the wrong stats on it which look like they were cribbed from Wikipedia as they also say the same thing.
I had one of the only NICAM portables which I got during the 1994 World Cup. 75 quid more than it mono sibling. Thing was the speakers on it were *terrible*. Luckily it had a built in amplified speaker output on the back so I wired it to some 1970's Hi-Fi speakers. Worked well then.
Although when the set was warming up the NICAM light would flicker and it would make farting noises as it switched between NICAM and mono.
>They made one called "brightness" but it appears to be broken.
Ah, no, the meaning changed. Whereas is used to mean intelligence (as in "he/she is quite bright) it now means "enthusiastic media whore".
The problem is that everyone turning it up to make things more intelligent only resulted in the creation of Chico and then Jedward as people turned it up even more.
In retrospect, I probably should have mentioned this earlier. Sorry.
When they switched over to digital in our area, the TV is now essentially unwatchable for me. For most people slight fuzziness on analogue is perfectly watchable. But one blocking-artefact per ten minutes is highly irritating. One dropped frame per minute spoils my enjoyment to the point where I don't bother to watch the channel. Not can't, don't.
Instead, now I watch iPlayer (only). The quality is no worse than broadcast, and in fact miles better for anything except the Beeb, but at least I get to choose exactly what I want. ITV or Channel 4, with all their adverts - gone. Not interested at that level of quality.
Maybe I'm weird, but I'm not so sure....... For my parents and all their friends (in their 70's / 80's), this re-tune stuff is beyond them. In their day, the TV repair-man re-tuned the telly. Sure, their son can visit & tune the telly every couple of months. But as far as Mum is concerned, "it's broken again in a month". So, she's not interested in the "value proposition" of TV any more. She listens to Radio 4 FM, and is quite happy. Not as good as the old days of course, with two whole TV channels (in the evening), but really not such a hardship.
Yeah, I'm aware of Virgin - went round to someone's house and saw it. Didn't want to hurt their feelings, because they pay as much in 3 months as my TV license is for a whole year. But it was SHIT. No drop-outs, but the compression is laughable. You can't seriously watch a play, let alone a football match when everyone is made out of Lego. It was like one of those conversations where your friend has just shelled out £12K to have solar panels put on the roof, to save themselves £300 leccy a year, and you have to bite your tongue.
Maybe you laugh - but that's almost all of the population that ITV just lost. The young watch the internet, the old revert to the radio because digital TV is unusable. Remind me, how is ITV's share price doing these days? I just can't understand why ITV let them do it. Group think at its finest.
ITVs remit appears to be reality talent shows and whatever scraps of football fell of the bskyb table.
The fact that the yoof can now watch this on ITV on their 50" LCD TVs followed by the followup programme on ITV2 followed by some other celeb nonsense on ITV4 falls right into their demographic.
I was watching CSI when the change over happened and everything went blank. I can normally see the Crystal Palace tower (on a good day). I use just a cheap internal aerial pointing in the right direction.
I retuned immediately and a few (21 I think) channels came up immediately, but NOT the 5* channel I was watching - never did get to see what happened. :-(
After a while, maybe half an hour, a few more channels appeared making about 41 or so.
I gave up on telly then, and tried to sleep.
A bit later, about 3am, I turned the set on again, retuned, which showed the usual 120 (ish) channels. Then spent another half hour removing all the stupid sales channels, wank channels (why are they so ugly?) and the talking bollox channels.
I hope I don't have to go through all that again...
P.