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Freeview Lite
Chris_Hulse1
Posts: 197 Forum Member
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Hello,we have several Freeview Lite transmitters around our area (Halesowen/Haden Hill/Kinver),and i was wondering how many people are actually using them as most houses now have either Sky,Virgin cable or have their aerials pointing to a main transmitter with the full Freeview service available.
Surely they are just a hangover from the analogue days,when quite a few were built to overcome ghosting which is not an issue today with digital?
Surely they are just a hangover from the analogue days,when quite a few were built to overcome ghosting which is not an issue today with digital?
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Not everyone can afford cable and not everyone can erect a satellite dish.
Not for ghosting which a better aerial was able to help with, but to fill holes in the main transmitter coverage due to local topograpy. Try and get TV at the bottom of a valley with a gritstone escarpment in the way in the Peak District, no amount of extra power will help.
Take a look at houses in Matlock Bath or Cheddar Gorge using Google street view.
An aerial install for the relay is no more than £150, less if you aren't using multi room distribution, and all but a tiny number of homes can easily get the signal - with a modest compact aerial. But it's freeview lite.
Sky is dominant around here. 8 out 10 homes have a dish, although some are just using sky for the basic channels, and a minority are using the dish for freesat. The popularity of sky didn't take off with the digital switchover, it had already happened prior to that. It was the only way to receive channel 5 in the early days, and the only way to get a proper 16:9 widescreen format. At that point, widescreen CRT televisions were already very popular and so people wanted sky to get a widescreen broadcast.
More or less all of that happened to me when we got freeview first, pre-dso. Spent £300 on a new aerial (the old one was for the relay and pre DSO there was no digital signal from it). all was fine for a while, but then the brackets couldn't take the strain anymore, damaged the brickwork. Got that corrected, but later suffered poor reception issues. Eventually after DSO got rid and replaced with a basic small aerial for the relay, & suplimented with freesat
Around here, most, if not all of the old installations (from the analogue era) are on the better fixings as u describe. All new ones, at least where a completely new installation was done have the thin poles and small, single bracket, even with those high poles with big aerials on top - not good. When I say all new, I really do mean all new, it's easy to spot. Some lucky people have brand new, large aerials for mendip, on top old style fixings - they kept the old pole + didn't touch the fixings to the brickwork. None of these have been blown down in the nearby area.
So, I was wondering if only the flimsy installations were used nowadays.
As an aside, a few people have trouble getting a satellite signal. I drive pass one example twice a day. They have tall trees overhanging the house. The mini dish is mounted on top a very sturdy looking pole, it's new but is in the style of those old type aerial installations.
The two hotels I been in they only offer Freeview lite in the hotel rooms but Sky or Virgin in the bar area.
Darren
A few houses still have enormous (at least they look enormous to me) VHF radio aerials. Horizontal orientation, pointed to the very far away wenvoe mast (mendip apparently is quite a bit newer than wenvoe so in the golden age of radio, VHF here would have come from wenvoe). I recall one person in my family telling me that early VHF tv was also from wenvoe - not mendip - in the early days, with what he said was a very poor (snowy) picture, again with I guess more very large VHF tv aerials. The tv aerials were later changed for UHF on mendip, but that would still have been about the biggest you could get, while the VHF radio aerial remained in use until much later when FM from mendip and eventually our relay mast became available (followed by a further dedicated commercial/BBC local FM shared mast in the opposite direction). From then on FM reception on portable sets with pull up aerials or systems with a wire aerial were sufficient, although the choice of stations was limited (and still is unless you use dab, online, or satellite). Freeview radio doesn't really count as much because the number of radio feeds is very limited on freeview lite (just BBC).
I think you mean Band 1 TV aerials for the old 405 line service,they certainly were big,10 feet width!brackets for lashing certainly had to be strong for those set ups.
Off the top of my head some likely DII sites: Croydon Old Town, Hammersmith and for quite a few Scottish and Welsh Valley sites DII was a contributor to the 'unserved' population count.
There was(is) quite a number of relay transmitters that are no longer 'needed' post DSO but then the Govt. decreed no-one should be forced to get a new aerial... so the planners had to keep the existing ones (and add a few more, for continental interference reasons).
Mendip doesn't carry national FM radio.
http://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/gallerypage.php?txid=620
Mine is inside the loft, but I was still able to get the full Freeview range by replacing the aerial and pointing it at the main transmitter.