[mythtv-users] UK Crystal Palace OTA reception issue on CH55

[Simon Hobson]

David Watkins <watkinshome at gmail.com> wrote:

> The aerial looks like this one
> 
> https://www.toolstation.com/loft-outdoor-tv-aerial-kit/p79595?
> 
> but it's showing its 25+ years age and has a couple of bent elements which can't help.

Hmm, looks a bit like a bacofoil contract aerial !
I get my aerials from https://www.aerialsandtv.com/ - you'll find a veritable goldmine of information there, as well as a good selection of aerials to pick from.


> Should my aerial be suitable for 746MHz - in which case I might look at the cabling and splitters.

Look at your current aerial and see what colour the plastic plugs are - though that might be difficult to see after 25 years. They are colour coded to show the aerial band - if you have (e.g.) a Group A aerial then it's not going to pick much up on Ch55.

> Is it worth worrying about that multiplex when the above website says this about it.
> 
> Being removed from Freeview (for 5G use) after November 2020

Well it might not have moved yet (I suspect Covid had put a massive spanner in the works of transmitter conversions), but the politics was decided a long time ago that TV was moving down the band - so it'll move sooner or later.

It's a bit of a PITA. My main transmitter is Winter Hill which still has a mux (or two, can't remember offhand) higher up the band. But I wasn't going to buy a wideband aerial - see the aerial information on the site I linked to above to see why. So for now I have a Gp A 16 element Yagi (we're a looong way from the tx) pointed at Lancaster which, while it doesn't carry two smaller mixes WH does, has everything within the reception band for a GpA aerial. At some point (when they've done shuffling muxes down the band), I'll move it to use WH.



Mike Perkins <mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk> wrote:

> In my case, one of the muxes is now interleaved with others from transmitters I don't want. This makes selecting the correct ones somewhat interesting.

Yeah, that is interesting.
Over the years I've done a fair bit of retuning stuff for friends. It used to be simple for us - either unplug the aerial until you reach into the 50s, or unplug it after it gets to the 50s, during the tune. Our main transmitters all used frequencies up into the high 50s and 60s, while the local ones were all below 50(ish).
Then I got asked to help by someone with a nice (I suspect expensive) TV (Scandinavian sounding brand, can't remember what now, could have been Loewe) and that picked up both Winter Hill and Moel-Y-Parc (North Wales) even though M-Y-P was well off axis for the aerial. That was right PITA to deal with as it meant looking at the frequency for each of the channels (it just had BBC1, BBC1, BBC2, BBC2, and so on) and deleting the unwanted ones. In hindsight, might have been easier to pop an attenuator in while tuning - but I didn't have any back then.

At least new stuff seems to prompt for which region/area you want to use when it detects two sets of muxes.

Simon