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Old 2nd July 2008, 02:06 PM   #4 (permalink)
TheRob
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Re: 70% signal strength enough ???

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Originally Posted by Xearo View Post
Thanks for the immediate reply GlenR!!

ill run scanchannelsbda tonight when i get home and ill post the results.

P.S just got the boss to test it out and she said that channel 7 started to work for about 15 minutes :/ - now im completly confused

Again thankyou very much for your suggestion Glen!
It really does sound like you are not getting a good signal for 7. Signal strength measured without signal quality is essentially meaningless. Scanchannelsdba will give you a reading for both, but I've always found the results quite difficult to interpet definitively. Give it a go, but I think it will just confirm that your channel 7 reception is dodgy.

BTW the reason you are getting some intermittent reception is that, unlike analogue TV, digital TV is either on or off - there's no gradual degradation of the picture with falling signal strength or quality. At some point the channel just stops working. The phenomenon is called the 'digital cliff'. You usually either receive a channel or you don't. But sometimes, as in your case, you are right on the cliff. So a slight change in weather, cloud cover, ambient electrical noise, etc. is enough for you to go from reception to no reception and vice versa.

If that's the case you will need to check your antenna and cabling. If you are spitting the signal from the wall socket to drive a number of things, then putting a booster before the splitter - or better still getting an amplified splitter - may help. If your HTPC is currently plugged directly into the antenna socket, then a booster is unlikely to help.

Adding a masthead amplifier to your antenna might help, but you really need to have the signal strength and quality professionally measured to know this.

If the obvious things don't help (ensuring the fly lead from the HTPC to the wall socket is of good quality and in good condition, plugging the HTPC directly into the wall socket with no splitters in the circuit, making sure the connection on the antenna is not corroded or damaged, etc), then I'd call in a professional installer.
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