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winter hill com 7
anthony david
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Occasional glitches seem to be occurring again after Arqiva's successful fix for these problems in september. As they have not been too bad I have ignored them but after someone raised the issue on the UK Free TV site I contacted Digital UK and have agreed to be contacted directly by Arqiva. Meanwhile if any of you are seeing problems on com7 in the winter hill area please report them to Digital UK. The glitches are infrequent and only a second or two long, anything more serious is liable to be a problem local to yourself. Digital UK only act on viewers reports, they do not monitor forums.
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Mike.
If a programme on BBC4 gets 1m viewers, half may be on satellite/cable, and only 10% will want to watch it in HD. Of those only 70 % can get com7. The NW region has a population of 7m, the UK populate is around 60m so the number of people watching BBC4HD from winter hill com7 is possibly only 4,000.
Mike.
I agreed to be contacted, If it is a local problem then so be it but I don't think it is. Most people will just switch to SD and forget about it altogether. I haven't watched much BBC 4 HD recently as my wife got annoyed by the glitches even though they were quite infrequent and so my recent recordings for her have all been SD. If there are no programming clashes I will make both an SD and an HD recording to see if, as this chap says, the fault has been fixed but as she is slow to watch some of her stuff the SD version will be the priority at the moment.
Looking at the latest BARB figures for ITV, 15 occasionally 20% of viewing is now HD, not 10% as I stated earlier. In the absence of any further information I assume this is true for other channels as well.
Thank you for reporting the problem as the more reports they get the better. Previously their fix did seem to work as far as I was concerned and even now the problem is better than it was. My wife however is far less tolerant of the occasional glitch than soft SD pictures, they don't seem to bother her at all.
Mike.
The symptoms I see are a brief (1 or 2 seconds) of severe picture pixellation, but I have not seen my Humax tuner drop the signal completely and display a message - but that could simply be chance. Recorded over several months, the Humax reports a signal of between 57 and 60 on COM7, from a Vision V10-36L log-periodic aerial and an Antiference 260L distribution amplifier.
Let's hope this time they really fix it.
Thanks Mike I was just going to post the same information from the same site. I wonder wether there is no serious TX logging for this com or wether they thought "It's an arts channel, no one watches those in the north", having lived in London I wouldn't be too surprised if it was the latter.
My Sony TV gives a message but my Humax only gives one if the break is a few seconds, recording have on the odd occasion said scrambled but usually it is just a blank screen. Pixilation on areas of the picture with rapid movement or on cuts are another symptom. It happened twice on the early TX of film review (BBC News channel) last week which I record in HD but I watched the same channel for some time yesterday with no faults. The fault is intermittent, I can sort of live with it for the better picture quality but my wife hates it preferring the reliability of SD. Hopefully it will now be fixed properly but as I have said before the com seems to be have constructed out of old junk lying around after DSO.
Hi Anthony, I'm afraid there's been no improvement in my neck of the woods, and last night Com7 was completely unwatchable, blanking out for many seconds at a time constantly. How long it lasted I don't know: i gave up after half an hour. I have seen this twice before, and am almost sure the high winds have something to do with it, but not at my end because all other muxes were flawless. In normal weather I just get the usual drop out problem with several BBC4HD recordings affected in the last week.
Mike
Thank you for your patience while the signal dropouts on COM7 from Winter Hill transmitter were investigated.
I am pleased to confirm that the cause was identified and has been rectified. Please let me know if you do encounter any further problems.
May I also thank you for your feedback which helped highlight the issue for investigation and resolution.
Yours sincerely,
Neil Brennan
Senior Viewer Relations Manager
Digital UK Directors' Office
Thanks to all of you who contacted them.
I received the same email, so here's hoping. I shall keep observing until I'm convinced.
Mike.
Unhappily, and frustratingly I have to report no improvement at all here in the FY8 area, with both episodes of "Spiral" last night showing signal failures and multiple glitches. I shall have to get in touch with DigitalUK yet again. As usual, all other muxes, including the local Preston/Blackpool petal, showed rock-steady 100% Q.
Mike.
I recorded and watched both episodes of Spiral together with Sound On Sound from BBC4HD. I also watched the Friday evening edition of The Film Programme and Saturday morning's Click from BBC News Channel HD. All were fault free leading me to believe that the fault has been fixed.
I'm not sure if you have the same version of the Humax Fox-T2 that I have but if so the following channel numbers with their respective signal strengths, measured this morning, may be useful to you for comparison purposed. All channel are received with 100% quality. I should say that if there were minor reductions in signal strength for any reason it is unlikely that they would affect reception at my location but perhaps they may at yours.
31/69%, 49/77%, 50/78%, 54/80%, 55/78%, 58/78%, 59/77%.
My Sony TV says that the Carrier/Noise ratio for BBC 1 HD is 32db, BBC 4 HD is 30db.
BBC 2 HD is on a different multiplex, this thread is about an ongoing problem that affected Winter Hill com7 only and now seems, hopefully, to have been rectified.
Signal strength isn't an issue as they are all good (broadly similar to those quoted) and never vary. Com7 reception is also extremely good except for the dropouts.
I'm beginning to wonder if there's some sort of beam effect making the fault directional. I don't know if that's even possible. If I saw this problem on other muxes then the finger would point at my aerial system, but that.'s been checked out, and all flyleads replaced with no difference at all. If it's some local pulse interference then it's frequency-specific and doesn't just interfere but totally destroys the signal momentarily. And since this is still the same issue that Arquiva admitted existed i believe they haven't got it completely right yet.
Mike
Well according to Ofcom data, COM 7 using a tx array at 237 metres, the main PSB/COM antenna is 50 metres higher.
I suppose it's possible there's a duff RF connection on the feed to the elements that face in your direction, either on the back of the array panel, or a duff power divider behind it.
Though I'd have thought such a fault would trip the protection circuits, as the VSWR would go bananas, perhaps as it's only a fraction of second it doesn't ?