No review today as I didn't really get the chance to do any last weekend as I was jibbering on about earlier in the week.
As such instead I thought I'd post about something that finally happened today - we went digital. Which is to say they've now fully switched off the analogue TV signal where I am.
It seems to have taken absolutely bloody ages for it to happen. And it seems that way because it has taken absolutely bloody ages for it to happen.
Switchover was meant to all be completed by now but there have been various delays that have meant it's only now that it's all switched over. It didn't even happen all in one go.
They switched off one of the channels at the beginning of the month (the 4th I think it was) and today they've switched off the rest. This has meant two lots of me having to retune my digital box, which is always a complete pain.
The problem is it takes ages and seems to be quite badly affected by atmospherics. Which is to say that when the weather is bad like it has been just recently some of the channels can be subjected to quite a bit of noise / interference and the box tends to err on the side of caution.
Well, I say that, it's actually a really good decoder and is able to tune in to channels that other people's cant, but when it does the scanning and saving it seems to be quite conservative for some reason. Certainly it occasionally seems to miss channels.
It did that this morning and I'll have to return it when I get back home.
The other issue I have is that the recording schedule gets wiped when it rescans. This is sort of understandable as the channel numbers may change or, as I say, some channels may be lost; however the bit that I don't get is that, if you do the retune it scrubs everything before it does the retune.
So as soon as you hit the "scan" button it deletes all the old channels and the recording schedule. So if you don't save the results of the scan you end up with 0 channels. It's rather weird, though considering it's the only compliant I have of the box that's not too bad going.
One weird thing that did happen between the two switchovers was one Sunday morning it had really poor reception across all the channels - literally searching brought up only about 8 channels, all of them BBC. This rectified itself by the afternoon (thankfully, as it was a Grand Prix day!) but then after that it seemed to be picking up additional channels from the next region over. I therefore had two radio 4s and two BBC Parliament channels (the duplicates were more than a little random!).
Hopefully I'll be able to do a scan when I get back and it'll pick up the channels it missed and not give me the random extra ones. Then it's just a case of setting up all the recordings again.
One thing I did notice this morning was that the signal strength had shot up for all the channels it did pick up. This is something they said would happen after switchover, as the digital signal apparently would interfere with analogue. I'm not sure if they'll "turn-up" all of the transmitters once the whole country is switched over, but certainly the signal was saying it was around 60% where it had been about 40% before (percentage of what I'm not sure!).
No comments:
Post a Comment