[mythtv-users] UK DVB Tuning Nightmare

[Mike Perkins]

On 19/05/11 16:33, Fluf wrote:
> On 19 May 2011 16:22, John Pilkington<J.Pilk at tesco.net>  wrote:
>
>>
>> I agree with all that Mike has said here, but I suspect that even that
>> may be making things more complicated than is necessary unless you
>> really want to be able to get your signals from more than one
>> transmitter - perhaps to have the option of two sets of regional
>> programmes - and your aerial and location will permit this.
>>
>> If your best choice of a single transmitter is obvious, I think you only
>> need to input the frequency for _one_  of its multiplexes and tick the
>> option to look for others that are linked to it; but you need to have
>> deleted _all_ your dvb channels before you do this.
>>
>
> Ey up!
> I'm a bit stunned actually. I know most people have a dipole, single
> direction aerial, so they point it and go with what they get. But I know
> that if I went for one of the 3 or so transmitters I can get a useable
> signal from and ditched the others, I'd have a lot less channels. Some areas
> of the UK are still around the only 8 or 9 channels including radio from one
> transmitter as an option. Other areas get more.
> Also, different transmitters bunch the channels together in different ways.
> So recording from the same frequency becomes more of a choice when you use
> more than one transmitter.
>
> I thought this was the kind of thing Myth was supposed to be great at!
>
> [And btw. From previous experiments, if I do a single transponder search
> including looking for linked, I very often get sent to some of the known bad
> frequencies, but oddly, I've never had a scan on a different frequency come
> up with 842 for example, which is probably the strongest signal I've got.]
>
> I think what I'm saying is .. in my situation, the myth-setup program really
> doesn't make it easy at all to configure and be sure you know what it's
> doing in the background. I know what I want to achieve, and it seems
> reasonable to me to be able to use the signals from the transmitters I can
> get ... I just have a cludgy tool that I don't really trust to try and do it
> with.
>
Erm, no. If you are talking about *digital* TV, then you likely get almost *all* 
of the available channels. It's nothing like analogue, where you got the BBC 
channels from one transmitter and the ITV ones from another. *All* channels are 
transmitted from one location by the same aerial.

The only reasons you might want to have more than one aerial pointed in 
different directions are: (i) you want to get the local news/weather from more 
than one region or (ii) you're near the English/Welsh/Scottish border and want 
both options. Of course, if you do that you'll need at least one tuner per aerial.

-- 

Mike Perkins