I have two related questions:
[LIST=1][*]Last Monday Evening, I set my 9200 to record 'The Palace' on ITV1 at 9pm, but in fact we managed to settle down to watch it live. However, there was no signal on that channel (the Hummy reported 'Encrypted or bad signal', and my iDTV reported 'No signal'). ITV3 and Channel 4 were the same. Analogue TV was OK, so we watched it on that.
We are on the Crystal Palace Transmitter, and I wonder if anyone is aware of it being reported elsewhere? During the commercial breaks, I switched back to digital to see if it had recovered. It hadn't the first time, but was OK at the second, so the signal came back between about 9:15 and 9:30.
[*]Out of interest, I checked the Hummy afterwards to see what happened when the signal was restored, only to find nothing had been recorded (I'm on V.21). Is it normal for the box not to start recording if there's no signal? I was expecting perhaps 20 minutes of blank screen and then the picture.[/LIST]Thanks.

I am not certain but I think the answer is that it is normal. I seem to remember some previous posts from people trying to record the first programme of the day on stations that don't transmit continuously having similar problems if pre-padding meant the recording attempted to start before the broadcast. I was also surprised that when I inadvertently disconnected the aerial feed for several minutes whilst our 9200 was recording something there was not a blank region in the program but rather it just jumped over the period where the signal was missing.

Same for me - no signal from Durris for a while yesterday and only the last 5 minutes of Come Dine With Me were recorded....

I've has this a couple of times this week from Sutton Coldfield ? I haven't had my Hummy long but thia loss of signal has only happened after the .21 upgrade.

So is it the Hummy or Transmitter ?

Well, in my case it was definitely at the transmitter (Crystal P) end, because my digital TV gave the same thing. As I say, ITV3 & C4 were also affected. BBC1 and -2 were OK. Obviously, I didn't check every channel, nor am I sure that the missing ones were on the same MUX. Was that a possibility?

That's interesting. It seem to imply that it won't start at all if there's no signal, but it will simply pause if it loses it during recording. I've no problem with it not recording no signal, but perhaps it also ought to enter pause mode if there's no signal at the start.

Well if it's an set with AR, the programme ID is sent in the signal, no signal=no AR recordings.
Since PVRs record the data stream, it's no suprise that when there's no signal, no data, nothing is recorded at that time.

Good point, but Martin's post mentioned a recording not starting because of autopadding, when AR is turned off.

It is all down to the weather - the conditions that give foggy nights also give severe multi-path interference. This is (ironically) due to reception being 'too good' so that you receive signals from a far off transmitter that happens to have signals on the same channel(s) as your local one. The two signals interact giving (in the case of digital) such severe error rates that the receiver assumes there is no valid signal.
I have found (on CP fringe) that there is fortunately often no direct correlation between the analogue and digital results during such conditions. When I have an unwatchable analogue picture the digital is still OK, and vice versa.

Not recording the first programme of the day from an off-air channel is probably a PID filtering issue - it's a bug we had on the Toppy ages ago, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the cause on the Humax is exactly the same.

In the case of part time channels, it's not that there's no signal in the strictest sense. It's that for most of them, there is a signal, but it's configured differently. The stream is used for another channel (eg BBC3/CBeebies or ITV4/CITV until recently), and the network parameters are set up so that when you tune to the channel that's turned off, the video stream is hidden and an MHEG layer shown instead, with the channel times or some other message.

Pad a recording to start earlier, and it'll start when the station is in that state, and due to the bug, the PVR doesn't update when the configuration of the channel changes at the start of the daily broadcast and so doesn't see the video stream to record it correctly.