We have a Samsung TV with built in Freeview decoder and although we have had it several months I have just been playing with the technical side of it and stumbled upon the menu which shows the signal strength readings.

Interestingly it claimed that the strongest Mux was Mux 1 with signal strength of 80 (assuming its percent from the amount of the bar it filled) with a bit error rate of 0 (over a period of a minute or so). The weakest Mux was Mux D with a signal strength of between 32 to 35 and a bit error rate that hovered around 1 (occassionally going to 0 or 2).

I got the Thomson box and to make the comparison fair I moved it so that it was using the same aerial point as the TV and found that the Thomson seemed to give a signal strength of 5 and a quality of 6 or 7 on all 6 Muxes I know for certain that I have problems with Mux D glitching on the Thomson occassionally which would indicate that it is weaker than the others but based on the Samsung readings I would have expected a greater spread of signal strength reading to be shown on the Thomson.

The signal meters on all this type of kit are not based on any standard and will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer so it is not possible to make any direct comparison form one to another. In addition the reading is only instantaneous and is largely meaningless in the context of determining if you have a good consistent signal. The only way really is to either get an aerial specialist run some prolonged tests on your signal, or simply watching TV and noting how often you get picture/sound drop-outs.

Finally your IDTV will have only a single tuner while the DH4000 has to feed two tuners which may degrade the signal available to each slightly.

Snail