What Happened?

I live in a really bad reception area.

TV, radio, mobile phone, all virtually useless. As it happens, even Sky
was almost a no no. We found _one_ place in the garden about 50 metres
from the house that works.

On analogue TV we had 4 snowy channels and occasionally a bad channel 5.

When digital came around I bought a Sony STB and sometimes we'd get
channel 5 and one or two others but it really wasn't worth the effort.

Last Summer the venerable CRT died so we sprang for a plasma and the
previously mentioned Sky. The STB went to the upstairs bedroom where it
behaved as it did downstairs.

Suddenly a couple of months ago, I did a another of my frequent rescans
and bingo... 80 channels. I think about 61 TV, mostly useless but all
the hoped for ones are there.

My daughter said: 'It's atmospherics, it won't last.'

But it has lasted, and I haven't found any major changes mentioned
anywhere.

I believe the transmitter is Sandy Heath (my post code is CB10 2XX)

Can anyone shed any light on the matter?

TIA
Tom
--
With or without religion,
you would have good people doing good things
and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

"Tom Warner" wrote in message
...
I live in a really bad reception area.

TV, radio, mobile phone, all virtually useless. As it happens, even Sky
was almost a no no. We found _one_ place in the garden about 50 metres
from the house that works.

On analogue TV we had 4 snowy channels and occasionally a bad channel 5.

When digital came around I bought a Sony STB and sometimes we'd get
channel 5 and one or two others but it really wasn't worth the effort.

Last Summer the venerable CRT died so we sprang for a plasma and the
previously mentioned Sky. The STB went to the upstairs bedroom where it
behaved as it did downstairs.

Suddenly a couple of months ago, I did a another of my frequent rescans
and bingo... 80 channels. I think about 61 TV, mostly useless but all
the hoped for ones are there.

My daughter said: 'It's atmospherics, it won't last.'

But it has lasted, and I haven't found any major changes mentioned
anywhere.

I believe the transmitter is Sandy Heath (my post code is CB10 2XX)

Can anyone shed any light on the matter?

TIA
Tom
--
With or without religion,
you would have good people doing good things
and evil people doing evil things.
But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

I will have a guess from the info you have given. Trees.
Have any trees been felled in between your aerial and the transmission line
in the last few months? If not, then I am afraid that when the trees come
into leaf in the next couple of months, then you could lose the channels
again.

The good news is that your DTT signal is clearly borderline and a small
amount of work could permanently cure it for you. Thing to try (if you do
lose them again), connect the co-ax directly to the DTT receiver without any
sockets involved, make sure the co-ax is one continuous run in good
condition, get the aerial outside on the roof as high as possible.

The really good news is that when the analogue signal is switched off and
the digital power is increased, you won't have any problems. I live 14 miles
from the Winter Hill transmitter and can pick up perfect pictures on the
main BBC mux with no aerial attached to the co-ax, just shows how the
digital signal is all or nothing.

(Tom Warner) wrote:
...
When digital came around I bought a Sony STB and sometimes we'd get
channel 5 and one or two others but it really wasn't worth the effort.
...
Suddenly a couple of months ago, I did a another of my frequent rescans
and bingo... 80 channels. I think about 61 TV, mostly useless but all
the hoped for ones are there.
...
I believe the transmitter is Sandy Heath (my post code is CB10 2XX)

Plug your postcode into Wolfbane and click on the OS-grid-ref link and
you get a postscript drawing of the terrain from you to the transmitter.

http://www.wolfbane.com/cgi-bin/tvd.exe?

I see that you have a small hill just a quarter of a mile in front of
you that's the only obstruction. You need an aerial high enough to clear
that and you should be fine. Any building work changes (or chopped down
trees as DT mentioned) on that hill would have had an effect.

--
Dave Farrance

In an earlier contribution to this discussion,
Dave Farrance wrote:


Plug your postcode into Wolfbane and click on the OS-grid-ref link and
you get a postscript drawing of the terrain from you to the
transmitter.

http://www.wolfbane.com/cgi-bin/tvd.exe?

I see that you have a small hill just a quarter of a mile in front of
you that's the only obstruction. You need an aerial high enough to
clear that and you should be fine. Any building work changes (or
chopped down trees as DT mentioned) on that hill would have had an
effect.

Nice idea, but I can't get the terrain viewer to work - either in Firefox or
IE. It *says* you can save it as a Postscript file, but then only lets you
save it as a .exe - which opens in an MSDOS window with a cursor dancing
around, but nothing viewable.

In IE, you get a page of what I assume is Postscript text, but if you save
that as a .PS file and then use JawsPDF etc. to convert it into a .pdf file,
you get a blank page! What am I doing wrong?
--
Cheers,
Roger
______
Email address maintained for newsgroup use only, and not regularly
monitored.. Messages sent to it may not be read for several weeks.
PLEASE REPLY TO NEWSGROUP!

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 14:02:02 -0000, "Roger Mills"
mused:

In an earlier contribution to this discussion,
Dave Farrance wrote:


Plug your postcode into Wolfbane and click on the OS-grid-ref link and
you get a postscript drawing of the terrain from you to the
transmitter.

http://www.wolfbane.com/cgi-bin/tvd.exe?

I see that you have a small hill just a quarter of a mile in front of
you that's the only obstruction. You need an aerial high enough to
clear that and you should be fine. Any building work changes (or
chopped down trees as DT mentioned) on that hill would have had an
effect.

Nice idea, but I can't get the terrain viewer to work - either in Firefox or
IE. It *says* you can save it as a Postscript file, but then only lets you
save it as a .exe - which opens in an MSDOS window with a cursor dancing
around, but nothing viewable.

In IE, you get a page of what I assume is Postscript text, but if you save
that as a .PS file and then use JawsPDF etc. to convert it into a .pdf file,
you get a blank page! What am I doing wrong?

It used to work fine for me. I can assume they've recently broken
something as I now have the same issues as you.
--
Regards,
Stuart.

In message , Lurch
wrote

It used to work fine for me. I can assume they've recently broken
something as I now have the same issues as you.


They never fixed it. The file extension you get seems to be related to
which program is used to download the file.

1) Download the file
2) If it saves as xxxxx.exe just rename it to xxxxx.ps
3) You now need a postscript viewer to open the file

A small utility can be downloaded from
http://www.rops.org/
The older version, v5.3, is 350kbytes and is free - see link in the
opening page


--
Alan
news2006 {at} amac {dot} f2s {dot} com

"Roger Mills" wrote:

Dave Farrance wrote:

Plug your postcode into Wolfbane and click on the OS-grid-ref link and
you get a postscript drawing of the terrain from you to the
transmitter.
http://www.wolfbane.com/cgi-bin/tvd.exe?

Nice idea, but I can't get the terrain viewer to work - either in Firefox or
IE. It *says* you can save it as a Postscript file, but then only lets you
save it as a .exe - which opens in an MSDOS window with a cursor dancing
around, but nothing viewable.

In IE, you get a page of what I assume is Postscript text, but if you save
that as a .PS file and then use JawsPDF etc. to convert it into a .pdf file,
you get a blank page! What am I doing wrong?

It _is_ a bit strange that the site creates the postscript file with an
..exe extension because that does cause problems. The file has a
postscript "mime" association in the page's HTML code which is supposed
to be understood by the browser if it has an appropriate postscript
plugin. Saving the file, renaming it, and converting it to a .pdf file
should work so I don't know what the bug was there.

I'm using the default setup of Mandriva Linux which is the Firefox
browser with KGhostView as the postscript reader and that works fine.

GSview claims to work with Internet Explorer:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/index.htm

--
Dave Farrance

Alan wrote:

A small utility can be downloaded from
http://www.rops.org/
The older version, v5.3, is 350kbytes and is free - see link in the
opening page

That looks good. Ghostscript/GSview is a bit of a monster in comparison.

--
Dave Farrance

In article , Dave Farrance
wrote:

[Snip]

It _is_ a bit strange that the site creates the postscript file with an
.exe extension because that does cause problems. The file has a
postscript "mime" association in the page's HTML code which is supposed
to be understood by the browser if it has an appropriate postscript
plugin. Saving the file, renaming it, and converting it to a .pdf file
should work so I don't know what the bug was there.

I'm using the default setup of Mandriva Linux which is the Firefox
browser with KGhostView as the postscript reader and that works fine.

It actually works here too with RISC OS 4.39, Netsurf (test build) and
RiScript 5.02.

--
___________________________________________
|\ /| ark Fraser
| \/ | Somerset /www.mfraz.freeserve.co.uk
| |__________/Acorn SA RISC PC You know what the sig means!

In article , Tom Warner
writes
I live in a really bad reception area.

TV, radio, mobile phone, all virtually useless. As it happens, even Sky
was almost a no no. We found _one_ place in the garden about 50 metres
from the house that works.

On analogue TV we had 4 snowy channels and occasionally a bad channel 5.

When digital came around I bought a Sony STB and sometimes we'd get
channel 5 and one or two others but it really wasn't worth the effort.

Last Summer the venerable CRT died so we sprang for a plasma and the
previously mentioned Sky. The STB went to the upstairs bedroom where it
behaved as it did downstairs.

Suddenly a couple of months ago, I did a another of my frequent rescans
and bingo... 80 channels. I think about 61 TV, mostly useless but all
the hoped for ones are there.

My daughter said: 'It's atmospherics, it won't last.'

But it has lasted, and I haven't found any major changes mentioned
anywhere.

I believe the transmitter is Sandy Heath (my post code is CB10 2XX)

Can anyone shed any light on the matter?

TIA
Tom


If your postcode is putting U in the correct place north of Thaxted
Essex thats more Sudbury land there. Or even Crystal place comes in on
the higher bits. Sandy Heath isn't that good over that way.

Which way does everyone else's aerial point?..

That should be either North west for SH or South East for Sudbury
appx...


http://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/sudbury-map.asp

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/sandy-heath-map.asp

do bear in Mind that those are for analogue services but act as a pretty
good guide.

BTW Sudbury is a different aerial group...


--
Tony Sayer