Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

"Davey" wrote in message
...
That's what external HDDs are for, and a simple spreadsheet to keep
track of what's still unwatched. You could even print it out! But I
usually only archive something I want to keep, rather than something
recorded but not watched. Non-technical SWMBO is very good at asking me
to record something, which then sits there forever, unwatched and
unloved.

I've got nearly 1 TB of programmes that SWMBO has asked me to record which
she hasn't watched yet, though now we've got a Roku box and I've installed
Plex server on my PC, it's easier for use to watch on the TV than it used to
be when I had to keep a pen drive specially formatted in FAT and convert
recordings from WTV to MPG if we wanted to watch them on the TV because the
DVD player can't handle NTFS external discs and can't handle file formats
other than MPG - not even TS. Things that I've recorded for myself I usually
watch on my PC because VLC allows me to play them at higher speed so I watch
them quicker.

I generate a TXT file of the drive's contents (I have 1 TB, SWMBO has
another 1 TB drive) by doing "dir /b /s s: s:\s-drive.txt" every so often
to list pathnames without other clutter like size, timestamp.

It's a shame that there aren't devices that you can connect to a PC which
can understand all file formats (even WTV) and which can see a native
\\server\sharename\folder pathname without needing transcoding on the fly.
Well, apart from a Windows PC and VLC or Windows Media Centre.

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

On 31/10/2015 08:45, Woody wrote:


...and how many of us have nearly full PVR drives of progs we have
never got around to watching?


Me :-(
I even bought another PVR because at one time the first one didn't have
enough space for the stuff set to series record while I was on holiday.

I do actually watch the old stuff though, when I fancy it. So it isn't
just wasted disc space.

Jim

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

On 31/10/2015 12:17, Norman Wells wrote:
wrote in message
...

Non-technical SWMBO is very good at asking me
to record something, which then sits there forever, unwatched and
unloved.

Which I guess you daren't delete for fear of the wrath of god, right? You see, I'm
married too.

The only solution then is to archive out all of your stuff that you're never going
to watch, isn't it?

The other solution is to select it from the menu, pause it as it starts
on screen and ask if SWMBO is happy to watch it now.

On a surprisingly high number of occasions, the answer is "What did you
want to record that for?"
At that point I admit to not knowing, apologise for being daft, and
delete it.

One down, dozens more to go.

Jim

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

On Sat, 31 Oct 2015 16:22:37 +0000
Indy Jess John wrote:

On 31/10/2015 12:17, Norman Wells wrote:
wrote in message
...

Non-technical SWMBO is very good at asking me
to record something, which then sits there forever, unwatched and
unloved.

Which I guess you daren't delete for fear of the wrath of god,
right? You see, I'm married too.

The only solution then is to archive out all of your stuff that
you're never going to watch, isn't it?

The other solution is to select it from the menu, pause it as it
starts on screen and ask if SWMBO is happy to watch it now.

On a surprisingly high number of occasions, the answer is "What did
you want to record that for?"
At that point I admit to not knowing, apologise for being daft, and
delete it.

One down, dozens more to go.

Jim

Hmm. That usually gets a "I'll watch it later" response.

--
Davey.

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

On Wednesday, October 28, 2015 at 10:54:18 PM UTC, Indy Jess John wrote:
On 28/10/2015 18:37, Chris wrote:
On 28/10/2015 17:36, Mark Carver wrote:
On 28/10/2015 17:25, Robin wrote:


IIRC clearing the 800MHz band was decided in 2003 when that nice Mr
Brown oversaw just about all domestic policies across the UK!

And while I know BBC Engineering was good, if they allocated UHF
channels to Crystal Palace with a view to London not being bothered by
4G I'd like to know who now has their ouija board/crystal ball/magic
mushrooms/...

Fair point. Though of course who decided it was the top end of the UHF
band that had to be sold off, and not the bottom end ;-)


Perhaps they thought hard-working aerial-rigging families in the
Northern Powerhouse would welcome the 4G filter fitting work?



I have had a thing through my door informing me that 4G *might*
interfere, but they carefully avoided telling me if or when they might
install 4G close enough to risk causing me a problem.

Jim

They're not daft, announcing specific dates would result in, as Bill W. states upthread:-

"Sometimes we find that the 4G people have distributed leaflets, so any
reception problem of any kind whatsoever in the following months is
reported to us as 4G."

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

On Sat, 31 Oct 2015 08:54:05 +0000, Norman Wells wrote:

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...

I may not be the typical TV viewer but I suspect most, especially those
that have invested in a PVR, who, like me, value their time, rarely
watch live TV, choosing instead to schedule what their PVR will capture
for later viewing at a more convenient time of their own choosing with
the added bonus in the case of commercial broadcasts of being able to
skip past the adverts and unnecessary continuity crap.

It's an interesting psychological thing. I use my PVR to record
programmes I would have watched had I been able. But they more often
than not then sit on the hard disk for a long time, and frequently get
deleted without being watched at all.

The XYL makes good use of the living room PVR (a Toppy) to record her
favourite soaps (all of them! - it seems to me) and BBC1 tat so that she
can watch them later when she has the time or else guarantee being able
to watch the rest of a programme if her live viewing is interrupted for
any reason. Once she's viewed the recordings, she usually deletes them
straight away (she's, unlike myself, not a 'hoarder').

I, otoh, tend to add the recordings to an ever growing collection (hence
my 17TB NAS box). I use my desktop PC to record DVB-T SD programmes, 99%
or more being BBC broadcasts.

I very rarely bother recording commercial TV broadcasts since the
sanitising excision of advert breaks is more trouble than it's worth imo.
The odd TV series that are worthy of recording such as "The Big Bang
Theory", currently being shown on E4, I'll simply download via torrent
sources such as those provided by EZTV. The big advantage of this being
that someone else has already done the sanitisation work for me.


I know this is going to happen, but still dutifully set the PVR. Why?

I suspect it's more a case of "I'm not sure if this will be worth
recording but I'll record it anyway, just in case it turns out to be good
(because if it isn't, the shift delete key will 'un-waste' the disk space
it was occupying in an instant)."


It's even worse if I archive something out to DVD to tidy up the hard
disk. That's usually a film I always meant to see but couldn't set
aside the couple of hours it needs, which is more often than not. Once
archived, though, it never brings itself to my attention because it's no
longer on a visible menu. Consequently, it never gets watched at all
unless, that is, it comes round again live when, remarkably, I find I do
have a couple of hours to watch it in, so I do.

Am I alone in all this? Or should we set up a self-help group?

You're not alone. It's the nature of 'The Beast'. Being able to readily
record TV programmes to hard disk, however bad they may turn out to be,
means that when in doubt about a programme's 'worthiness' you record it
anyway, safe in the knowledge that it can be instantly deleted and the
space it was consuming fully retrieved for better things if, on closer
scrutiny, it turns out to be 'not as good as you'd hoped'.

It's a "Shoot first! Ask questions later." approach to deciding whether
or not to record a programme, aided by the fact that you can swiftly scan
through the recording when 'questioning' its worthiness as 'A Keeper'.

Like you, I also used DVD-R media to archive the worthy material until I
realised, about a hundred disks in, that it was cheaper to set up a NAS
box on the LAN and use TB sized hard disks instead. Not only was it
cheaper in terms of storage costs, it was also much cheaper in terms of
the time and effort required.

When I first started using my PC to record FreeView broadcasts a decade
ago, I was running win2k. My first couple of DVB-T tuners were external
USB connected boxes which came with their own rather flawed minimalistic
TV recording software and flakey support utilities. I think the Jetway
branded PCI adapter was the third DVB-T tuner which had been supplied
with its own TV recording software, DTVR.

This, like most of the adapter supplied recording software had its own
quirks and deficiencies but they weren't as annoying as those in the
software supplied with the other adapters and, better still, could be
worked around using internet TV listings such as Andrew Flegg's excellent
bleb.org web site along with the BBC's own TV listings pages. And, better
still, did not impose a horribly clumsy "Ten Foot Interface" on the user
such as the more pretentious Home Theatre/MediaCentre/GBPVR/MythTV
crapware that was on offer.

The big problem with windows based DVB-T recording software was the
limitation of only being allowed to record a single channel per tuner. If
you needed to record two TV programmes simultaneously, you needed two
tuners (either a dual tuner adapter or two seperate single tuner
adapters). Unfortunately, the K-World dual tuner PCI adapter I'd bought
to upgrade my PC with didn't have win2k driver support, only winXP
drivers (and possibly Vista) so was never used until about 4 or 5 years
ago when I started seriously experimenting again with Linux when I
discovered that the K-World card was amongst the group of adapters with
Linux driver support.

My solution to resolving two way recording conflicts was to use my Acer
Aspire 3660 laptop with a 'Peak' branded USB DVB-T tuning stick as a PVR
using the DTVR programme that had been supplied with the Jetway PCI
adapter rather than whatever crapware had been supplied with the USB
adapter (it kept things 'uncomplicated' using the same recording software
on both machines).

Scheduling recordings was entirely a manual data entry process for each
recording (although automated daily/weekly by time slot schedules could
be programmed for such programmes as "Eggheads"). I got rather good at
the mental arithmetic required to translate the start/end times in
programme listings into padded start times and recording duration plus
start and end padding time, a process made more complicated when
recording two or more back to back programmes on any given TV channel.

As fussy and complex as this might appear, the 'easier' "Ten Foot GUI"
styled interfaces of the likes of Mediacentre and GBPVR were so
incredibly and frustratingly lethargic, it was joy to use the DTVR
scheduler in spite of the mental gymnastics required.

On the rare occasions that I was faced with a three way scheduling
conflict, I'd fire up my al fresco linux test bed system with the K-World
dual tuner card fitted and schedule the additional recordings. However,
because it was an al-fresco setup, the adapter didn't have the benefit of
backplate support so there was a risk of intermittent connection in the
PCI slot inducing a lockup or corruption in the data stream which meant I
had to take extra care not to physically disturb this rather fragile
setup.

If, for whatever reason, I couldn't fire up the Linux test setup, I
could usually schedule the conflicting programme on the living room Toppy.
I tended to avoid that final resort since it meant a trip with the laptop
and use of the 4 1/2 metre USB cable to copy the recording off the Toppy
which by PC standards was an exceedingly glacial process (although only
half as glacial as it would have been if I'd chosen the cheaper Humax
instead of the Toppy).

All of that faff disappeared when I was finally forced to give up win2k
due to a long overdue hardware upgrade some 6 months ago. The problem
being the absence of win2k driver support. I installed Linux Mint 17.1
KDE 64 as my host OS and run win2k / winXP as VirtualBox Guest VMs.

As a consequence, I'm now using Kaffeine as my TV recording software and
very effective it is too! No longer do I have to minimise a Live TV play
window whenever DTVR started a scheduled recording (and mute the main
volume sound) or else watch whilst the programme was being recorded as I
often did. Kaffeine simply gets on with the job silently without
distracting me from whatever I might be doing with the machine. Never
have I recorded so much TV whilst watching so very little live TV.

Since all the BBC SD programme streams reside in a single multiplex, the
dual tuner adapter rarely gets to use the second tuner unless I decide to
channel hop across the commercial channels on other multiplexes for a bit
of light amusement.

Scheduling recordings is now merely a matter of going through the week's
worth of epg data and marking whatever programmes that take my fancy.
Since I've set the start/end padding times on a global setting, I no
longer have to calculate start and duration times. I also no longer have
to calculate a total recording time out of a series of two or more back
to back programmes for later slicing and dicing as was the case with DTVR.

Indeed Kaffeine will quite happily record back to back programmes with
overlapping paddings into their own individual files and do this whilst
simultaneously recording two or more additional TV streams (TV channels)
whether or not they also include back to back programme scheduling.

The difference between the windows way and the Linux way of recording
DVB-T broadcasts is like night and day (and in that order). One of the
problems with the card supplied windows recording software was that of
how the part time channels were dealt with during a tuning scan. Unlike
consumer STB kit which could allocate LCNs to inactive part timers like
CBBC and CBeebies during the evening period and BBC3 and BBC4 during the
day, DTVR and its ilk would only allocate slot numbers (*not* LCNs) to
whatever was currently active at the time of the tuning scan.

Kaffeine also seemed to suffer this same limitation but I discovered I
could work around this problem of "either / or" by repeating the scan to
pick up the previously absent part timers and manually add them to the
channel list. Quite against my expectations, this tactic actually worked.

Now my problem of "Recording more TV than I'm likely to watch" has been
exacerbated by my being able to record "Danger Mouse", "Dennis the
Menace", Shaun the Sheep", the rather surreal "Endangered Species" and
"Horrible Histories".

A further factor in recording massive amounts of TV programmes (in part
"Because I can") is my habit of recording the repeats, not just as
'safety copies' but largely so I could then choose from as many as 7
repeats of each episode of a BBC3 aired series to archive the least end
credit vandalised episode. A similar situation exists with BBC2 (usually
just a second showing in the week) and BBC4 (anywhere from 2 to 5 repeats
through the week, often repeats in the wee small hours of early evening
showings which tended to be less vandalised).

It's now gotten to such a pitch that I'm starting to forego the early
evening showings of a BBC4 programme if there's an early morning repeat
that's not vandalised by BSL available to record. These late night
repeats tend to only suffer audible vandalism without the end credits
crush of the early evening broadcasts. Sometimes, very rarely, there's no
continuity molestation at all.

I've now reached the point where I have to seriously question the "Shoot
first. Ask questions later." strategy, particularly when it comes to
stuff that I'm pretty certain are repeats of material I already have
archived. IOW, I've got to become a little more choosy about what I
actually add to the recording schedule. It's all too easy to let what
starts out as a pleasant pastime become a compulsive obsession.

My TV programme archiving activity is not without legitimate reason. I
record a wide range of material where as much as half is in the
documentary and science and natural history genre with the rest being a
mix of comedy (both new and old classics), drama and movies. I'm building
up a collection of documentary and Science and natural history to record
the less dumbed down programming style that undoubtedly will be lost as
the years progress. Plus, of course, programmes of historical interest
such as one about the (now infamous) Jimmy Saville from several years ago
when "He Could Do No Wrong".

This last is one I didn't bother to review (I never liked the man in the
first place) but simply realised a critical viewing would say a lot about
the culture of the BBC at that time as well about how history will be re-
written in the interests of 'Political Correctness' to remove his very
existence.

Last, but not least, is the very existence of such a large archive of
viewing material to choose from on a wet Sunday afternoon when Live TV
programming fails us in our hours of need. :-)

All good reasons for my ongoing TV archiving activities in the first
place. Now, all I've got to do is just dial the 'obsessive compulsive'
element down a few notches to keep it all in better proportion as a
'hobby activity' and I'll have it cracked.


--
Johnny B Good

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

On Sat, 31 Oct 2015 13:46:35 -0000
"NY" wrote:

"Davey" wrote in message
...
That's what external HDDs are for, and a simple spreadsheet to keep
track of what's still unwatched. You could even print it out! But I
usually only archive something I want to keep, rather than something
recorded but not watched. Non-technical SWMBO is very good at
asking me to record something, which then sits there forever,
unwatched and unloved.

I've got nearly 1 TB of programmes that SWMBO has asked me to record
which she hasn't watched yet, though now we've got a Roku box and
I've installed Plex server on my PC, it's easier for use to watch on
the TV than it used to be when I had to keep a pen drive specially
formatted in FAT and convert recordings from WTV to MPG if we wanted
to watch them on the TV because the DVD player can't handle NTFS
external discs and can't handle file formats other than MPG - not
even TS. Things that I've recorded for myself I usually watch on my
PC because VLC allows me to play them at higher speed so I watch them
quicker.

I generate a TXT file of the drive's contents (I have 1 TB, SWMBO has
another 1 TB drive) by doing "dir /b /s s: s:\s-drive.txt" every so
often to list pathnames without other clutter like size, timestamp.

It's a shame that there aren't devices that you can connect to a PC
which can understand all file formats (even WTV) and which can see a
native \\server\sharename\folder pathname without needing transcoding
on the fly. Well, apart from a Windows PC and VLC or Windows Media
Centre.


I just transfer from/to the PVR and PC using my network. The Customised
Firmware enable such events as decrypting first.
I don't know about Windows, I keep away from that unless absolutely
necessary!

--
Davey.

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...
The big problem with windows based DVB-T recording software was the
limitation of only being allowed to record a single channel per tuner. If
you needed to record two TV programmes simultaneously, you needed two
tuners (either a dual tuner adapter or two separate single tuner
adapters).

I'm not sure why Windows Media Centre can't schedule two programmes on the
same mux. It's technically possible: NextPVR can do it, and I've recorded
the whole of a multiplex (all 30 Mbps of it!) using VLC without even any
dropped frames that I can detect.


As fussy and complex as this might appear, the 'easier' "Ten Foot GUI"
styled interfaces of the likes of Mediacentre and GBPVR were so
incredibly and frustratingly lethargic, it was joy to use the DTVR
scheduler in spite of the mental gymnastics required.

Yes that ten foot GUI of Windows Media Centre is a bit cumbersome, but I've
got used to it now. I've been experimenting with NextPVR as an alternative,
particularly as a few of the new SD channels in DVB-T2 multiplexes (eg
TalkingPicturesTV) aren't listed in WMC's programme guide and can't even be
recorded manually by specifying channel. date and time explictly (weird).
When NextPVR works, it's good, though there are a few GUI howlers that I
would change - such as they don't build in "are you sure" confirmation if
you are about to do something destructive by accident such as delete a
recorded programme or cancel a scheduled recording. When I raised this as a
suggested improvement, I had my idea shot down in flames because the admin"
doesn't like all those unnecessary are you sure questions". I also found
that it would sometimes fail to scan the channels properly during setup,
giving them non-standard LCNs or else omitting some (even though others from
the same mux were there). On one occasion it decided that it couldn't talk
to the DVB-T adaptor for live view or recording, even though it could talk
to it for the initial channel scan. So I've got quite good at uninstalling,
deleting the config files and reinstalling!

It's a shame that most PVRs record to file formats such as TS which don't
have embedded metadata for episode summary, episode title etc, but instead
record to a separate XML file which you have to move around and rename when
moving/renaming the main TS recording. WTV may be rather a proprietary
format (though some packages such as VLC can play it) but at least it's an
all-in-one format.


I'll have to experiment with plugging both my DVB-T adaptors (the old
SD-only and the new one that can do HD as well) in and see how well WMC and
NextPVR handle recording programmes simultaneously from two different
muxes - but that will require an aerial splitter and extra cables! At
present if I want to record two things at once I record on my laptop with
the other adaptor, from the downstairs aerial socket. The feed from the
aerial is split two ways (lounge and study); if I further split the study
feed two ways two two tuners in PVR PC, I hope the signal is still strong
enough.

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

On Sun, 01 Nov 2015 09:47:54 +0000, NY wrote:

"Johnny B Good" wrote in message
...
The big problem with windows based DVB-T recording software was the
limitation of only being allowed to record a single channel per tuner.
If you needed to record two TV programmes simultaneously, you needed
two tuners (either a dual tuner adapter or two separate single tuner
adapters).

I'm not sure why Windows Media Centre can't schedule two programmes on
the same mux. It's technically possible: NextPVR can do it, and I've
recorded the whole of a multiplex (all 30 Mbps of it!) using VLC without
even any dropped frames that I can detect.

That's actually a trivial task for any reasonably modern PC kit
(anything made during the past 5 or 6 years is my best guess - that's
less than 4MB/s streaming rate to the disk as a single file, even ten
year old kit should keep up with that slow a streaming rate). The main
problem, if you're going to take that approach, will be how you're going
to handle the resulting 13.5GB per hour's worth of a full HD multiplex.



As fussy and complex as this might appear, the 'easier' "Ten Foot GUI"
styled interfaces of the likes of Mediacentre and GBPVR were so
incredibly and frustratingly lethargic, it was joy to use the DTVR
scheduler in spite of the mental gymnastics required.

Yes that ten foot GUI of Windows Media Centre is a bit cumbersome, but
I've got used to it now. I've been experimenting with NextPVR as an
alternative, particularly as a few of the new SD channels in DVB-T2
multiplexes (eg TalkingPicturesTV) aren't listed in WMC's programme
guide and can't even be recorded manually by specifying channel. date
and time explictly (weird). When NextPVR works, it's good, though there
are a few GUI howlers that I would change - such as they don't build in
"are you sure" confirmation if you are about to do something destructive
by accident such as delete a recorded programme or cancel a scheduled
recording. When I raised this as a suggested improvement, I had my idea
shot down in flames because the admin" doesn't like all those
unnecessary are you sure questions". I also found that it would
sometimes fail to scan the channels properly during setup, giving them
non-standard LCNs or else omitting some (even though others from the
same mux were there). On one occasion it decided that it couldn't talk
to the DVB-T adaptor for live view or recording, even though it could
talk to it for the initial channel scan. So I've got quite good at
uninstalling, deleting the config files and reinstalling!

I used to run into that problem with Kaffeine every so often (live play
only, iirc). Eventually I managed to figure out what was triggering this
loss of communication (which simply required me to restart Kaffeine,
preferably during a gap in the recording schedule if I didn't want to
interrupt an ongoing recording).

It turned out to be the result of my double clicking on an MKV to play
instead of remembering to right click in order to select VLC as the
playback app. I'd tried many times to make VLC the default app for MKV
files but to no avail. Eventually, I twigged to the strategy of
*removing* Kaffeine from the list of player software for MKV files. Now
all is sweetness and light. :-)

Whilst we're on the subject of Kaffeine as a TV recording app, I have a
'heads up' for anyone who wants to try using Kaffeine as their PVR app.
For some strange reason, Kaffeine will only update the epg when it is set
to live play, regardless of whether or not it happens to be recording
anything at the time. IOW, you need to "watch live TV" for a few minutes
every few days or so (a week at most if you want to avoid the epg
completely emptying out).

If you don't use the live play feature for a week, as I did with the
laptop (which is how I discovered this peculiarity in the first place),
the epg never gets refreshed and eventually empties which means it stops
recording.


It's a shame that most PVRs record to file formats such as TS which
don't have embedded metadata for episode summary, episode title etc, but
instead record to a separate XML file which you have to move around and
rename when moving/renaming the main TS recording. WTV may be rather a
proprietary format (though some packages such as VLC can play it) but at
least it's an all-in-one format.

Kaffeine simply uses the epg data to name the files. Unfortunately it
doesn't include date/time info. Also, it uses NTFS illegal characters
(notably : and ?) which is an irritation for me since I have to copy the
files to a VBox virtual NTFS disk volume mounted in the winXP VM which
runs the MPegStreamClip converter/editor I use to top and tail and
convert the TS files into headed MPG files. There simply isn't a *nix
alternative available to save me these extra steps.

When I first set up a win2k guest to host the MpegStreamclip processing,
I found it was running about seven times slower than on the original
hardware (a 3GHz clocked dual core Phenom with 3GB of ddr2 ram in the
recently retired win2k system that was displaced by my existing Linux
setup with a quad core AMD cpu and 8GB ddr3 ram.

Now I knew that the problem was an issue of data wrangling rather than
lack of cpu grunt so I looked at my storage options in the VM setup which
was using VBox shares to the original NTFS volumes on the two hard drives
inherited from the original win2k setup.

I created uncompressed fixed size 100GB virtual disk volumes, 2 of them
- one per physical disk. Whilst this did introduce additional file moving
operations, moving the TS files onto one virtual disk and configuring
MpegStreamClip to send its output to the other virtual disk turbo charged
the actual conversion process so that it now runs about 3 times faster
than it used to on the original hardware. Instead of taking about 30
seconds to convert a 29 minute programme, it's more like 10 or 12
seconds. It's a far cry from the initial 3 1/2 minutes it had been taking
when I was relying on directly accessing the files via VBox shares!

However, there were some issues using MpegStreamClip in the win2k VM.
Oracle seem to have 'lost the plot' in regard of win2k support during the
past 4 years since the time when a win2k VM ran rings around a winXP VM
so I created a fresh winXP SP3 VM to test whether I could resolve the
issues. As it happened, this did considerably improve the situation.
There were still some problems but the improvement was more than enough
for me to use the winXP VM for this task.


I'll have to experiment with plugging both my DVB-T adaptors (the old
SD-only and the new one that can do HD as well) in and see how well WMC
and NextPVR handle recording programmes simultaneously from two
different muxes - but that will require an aerial splitter and extra
cables! At present if I want to record two things at once I record on my
laptop with the other adaptor, from the downstairs aerial socket. The
feed from the aerial is split two ways (lounge and study); if I further
split the study feed two ways two two tuners in PVR PC, I hope the
signal is still strong enough.

The main problem PCI or USB DVB-T tuners have to face are the relatively
high levels of QRM generated by the PC or laptop itself. I think the
manufacturers deliberately make them less sensitive compared to the
tuners used by STBs and digital TV sets in order to allow them to handle
higher signal levels without suffering overload induced intermodulation
distortion when you feed them with a signal that's been amplified to
swamp the self generated QRM. IOW, it's probably a good idea to use
something like an amplified splitter as close as practicable to the
antenna (eg, diverting the antenna feed into the loft or attic to drive
something like a 4 way amplified splitter before sending the feeds to the
various rooms in the house).

You have to be careful not to overdo the amplification if you're getting
a good strong signal to begin with. I'm using a 10dB gain four way
splitter in the attic fed by an 18 element horizontal Group A/B yagi
pointing at a main relay only 2 miles away in direct line of sight and
directly in the beam path to its target service area another 8 miles
further on. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any sign of
overloading which is rather handy since I'm splitting the office/workshop
feed four ways using a couple of ex-NTL's finest 3 way splitters.

If you're going to amplify the antenna signal to overcome distribution
losses in the cabling and any splitters *and* the deafness typical of a
PC DVB-T adapter, it's worth investing in a set of attenuator pads (3, 6
and 10 dB pads should prove useful, the last one may only be needed if
you're going to use more than 10dB gain). It's worth keeping in mind that
a quality 2 way passive splitter will attenuate the signal by 3 1/2 dB
and a 3 or 4 way splitter by about 7 dB.

Although, as a rule, it's best to fit an amplifier or amplified splitter
at the antenna end of the feeder rather than between the TV set and the
the feeder, if your signal is strong enough to begin with and you're
simply compensating for splitter losses and/or DVB-T adapter 'deafness',
you should get good results, assuming quality feeder cable such as CT100,
simply by fitting the amplifier right by the DVB-T adapter's antenna
socket(s). IOW, try the 'easy' options first before clambering around
your loft or attic. :-)


--
Johnny B Good

Whatever happened to 4G interference?
 

Tweed wrote:

When the 4G 800 MHz allocations were made a while back, there was much
prediction of doom for TV reception in certain areas. I recall there being
much debate about how inadequate the filters might be and how it would all
never work. Given the silence since, I presume the end of TV reception did
not come to pass?


Just not yet for most of us, unless you live in Coldstream.


http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2015/1...t-loses-telly/

Tim