This 'ere digital TV rip off

[sonic_hawk]

The plus side is, because I am up a hill I now get BBC1 Wales, BBC2 Wales, ITV1 Wales and S4C 

Brilliant!

There's a bunch of people near me who got a similar service, whether up hills or not... trouble is, they live in Devon!

http://www.thisisnorthdevon.co.uk/digitaltv/Apologies-viewers-Welsh-TV/article-1436756-detail/article.html

And wouldn't this following quote strike fear into the hearts of technophobes:

Bill Taylor, a regional manager for Digital UK, said: "We are sorry to the people of Ilfracombe because we understand it must be deeply frustrating.

"There are a series of possible solutions and if people contact our helpline our staff will run through all the potential steps they can take."

OMG!

[Martin Daughton]

One disadvantage is that S4C showed the Bluebirds being battered, deep fried and served with chips...

But I could see the Rwgbi in Cymraeg. 

[Nick Nation]

People

I nervously bought one of those freeview digi-box things yesterday. The temptation to be able to record those missing episodes of Randall & Hopkirk finally proved too much. Needless to say, I'm having problems with it. Things were so much more straight forward when it was analogue, DIN plugs, VU meters and reel-to reel...

Anyway...as far as I can tell, it has been set up properly. The box is a twin-scart jobbie with one scart lead connected to a VCR for recording purposes. My problem is that recordings have two horizontal bands of white noise. These bands even appear when monitoring the VCR output. They do not appear if I monitor the digi-box output. I have tried playing back tapes on another machine, but the lines are still there.

Any ideas?

[Rob W]

Any ideas?

Yes, but not telling you as punishment for selling your soul to the devil.

Anyway, The Big Match Revisited is much better than Randall & Hopkirk.

As is George & Mildred

 

[Nick Nation]

Yes, but not telling you as punishment for selling your soul to the devil.

Ok, I admit I used to sell my soul to the devil. Then I just started giving it away. Nowadays, he just helps himself as I can't tell anymore. Nevertheless....

[Mark Davies]

People

I nervously bought one of those freeview digi-box things yesterday. The temptation to be able to record those missing episodes of Randall & Hopkirk finally proved too much. Needless to say, I'm having problems with it. Things were so much more straight forward when it was analogue, DIN plugs, VU meters and reel-to reel...

Anyway...as far as I can tell, it has been set up properly. The box is a twin-scart jobbie with one scart lead connected to a VCR for recording purposes. My problem is that recordings have two horizontal bands of white noise. These bands even appear when monitoring the VCR output. They do not appear if I monitor the digi-box output. I have tried playing back tapes on another machine, but the lines are still there.

Any ideas?

I once had problems with poor picture quality via SCART. It turned out that in the TV settings, the SCART input could handle normal or S-Video mode. It was incorrectly set to S-Video mode. I set it back to normal and all was OK. Worth a try.

[Tim W]

Freeview... or as it's known to some, Free-to-those-of-us-who-don't-live-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-valley-View.

[Mike Morgan]

Why, oh why has no-one offered the timeless resolution of 'turn it off and turn it on again'? 

Fujitsu charge thousand of pounds  a day for that advice.  Me, I'll suggest it for nothing.

[Mark Davies]

Freeview... or as it's known to some, Free-to-those-of-us-who-don't-live-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-valley-View.

You need to blow the dust off that satellite dish & get FreeSat.

[Tim W]

You need to blow the dust off that satellite dish & get FreeSat.

The wind doesn't allow any dust to settle on the dish. The ivy is starting to crawl allover it again though.

[Nick Nation]

Anyway...as far as I can tell, it has been set up properly. The box is a twin-scart jobbie with one scart lead connected to a VCR for recording purposes. My problem is that recordings have two horizontal bands of white noise. These bands even appear when monitoring the VCR output. They do not appear if I monitor the digi-box output. I have tried playing back tapes on another machine, but the lines are still there.

Any ideas?

Been fiddling pointlessly and can rule out (I think) Mark's Scart SVHS observation and MBB's turn it off and on again suggestion. (Thanks anyway, chaps).
The two horizontal bands are intermittent and can also be coloured rather than just dotty. They also float rather than appear in one place. I'm fed up.   

[Tel]

Why, oh why has no-one offered the timeless resolution of 'turn it off and turn it on again'? 

Fujitsu charge thousand of pounds  a day for that advice.  Me, I'll suggest it for nothing.

You always used to be able to tell a crap PC consultant because there answer to everything was to run check disk. (Those of us with any savy used to just run System Restore  ).

However this was surpassed by a not so friendly CS person at Sky yesterday. My broadband went off the air at about 3:00pm and after 10 minutes I rang Sky. The solution - recycle the power on the modem and if that doesn't fix it, don't worry it will come back later.

In the meantime I was supposed to do what........

When it hadn't come back in the hour I decided to do my own diagnostics. Eventually, after checking all the cables I changed the Micro Filter it came back.

As I had only put a new filter on a couple of weeks ago, for a fault that wasn't a problem with the M/Filter I sort have thought it would be okay - however Sky did not know this.

[Trevor Barstow]

Been fiddling pointlessly and can rule out (I think) Mark's Scart SVHS observation and MBB's turn it off and on again suggestion. (Thanks anyway, chaps).
The two horizontal bands are intermittent and can also be coloured rather than just dotty. They also float rather than appear in one place. I'm fed up.   

So from your description it's either the scart lead from digi-box to VCR or the VCR itself. If the VCR has a coax input you could try recording digi-box -> coax -> VCR OR aerial -> VCR direct.

[Mark Davies]

Been fiddling pointlessly and can rule out (I think) Mark's Scart SVHS observation and MBB's turn it off and on again suggestion. (Thanks anyway, chaps).
The two horizontal bands are intermittent and can also be coloured rather than just dotty. They also float rather than appear in one place. I'm fed up.   

So from your description it's either the scart lead from digi-box to VCR or the VCR itself. If the VCR has a coax input you could try recording digi-box -> coax -> VCR OR aerial -> VCR direct.

If the digi-box does have a coax output, what channel number is it outputting the signal on? Does that clash with the channel that your VCR is already using, or one of your analogue TV channels?

[Nick Nation]

Important development in the field of broadcasting.

A mate's fixed it. He did start to mention something about RF outputs bashing into each other and volcanic ash and F waves and anything. Maybe it wasn't F. There's a quarter mile of wiring in here which perhaps doesn't help. Can a car go to 32 Arcadia Crescent for Heathrow, right now please.