Terrestrial Digital TV,is it waterproof?

Mine works fine come rain or shine.

Mine hasn't so far, but I've only had it 4 months or so, so hasn't yet been through a winter.
Matt.

The weather does not affect Freeview like it does/did Sky.

When I had Sky, I always knew it had started raining/snowing before I had looked outside to confirm it.

Shite, isn't it?

Allen

OK thanks.

Mine has occasional drop outs and freezing. If it isn't the weather I don't know what it is.

I have been wavering lately. We have Freeview but some of the sport on Sky appeals. Are you guys telling me that it is weather-dependent? That would really suck at the moment!

In really heavy rain SKY box can loose the signal,medium rain upwards gives sparklies to drop outs.

One of reasons I moved from Freeview to Satellite was the impact of heavy rain and clouds corrupting the signal from the Isle of Wight. The amount of clouds between the dish and the satellite will never be 30 miles as it can be with Freeview.

Other than occasional software crash when a quick reboot sorts the problem I've only ever encountered problems with Sky when it has thundered.
I'm genuinely surprised to read so many negative comments. Is this because you have a poor signal strength to start with?
My only gripe with Sky is that they are mercenary, money grabbing bastards.
Regards,
Steve O.

quote:

My only gripe with Sky is that they are mercenary, money grabbing bastards.

Another reason why I am hesitant to take the plunge! Murdoch gets £2 a week off me for the Sunday Times - I am loath to give him more!

Chris

If Sky is the only way to get a reliable reception then it is worth the cash - you do not actually have to pay Murdoch a subscription, - there is FreeSat that gives you the Free to Air and Free to View programs plus all the sound, shopping and strange channels once you buy a sat box and dish and a £30 card to get the Frre To View stuff

We got sky some years ago because cable via NTL was getting to be a joke with poor equipment, poor reliability, incredibly poor service and increasing costs. Then moved to SKY + a few years ago.

After about 6 boxes, this latest one seems to be reliable (an Amstrad(!) one rather than the normal pace ones, go figure...) - their service was pretty much worse than NTL, until I realised that you could actually get through to someone in service, if you called their sales line 'by mistake' first...Yes it does drop out for up to ten minutes in severe weather conditions, although not as much as in the past for some reason.

We have the full package so that I can watch the sport and my daughter can see all the kiddie programmes, don't use it for much else apart from Prison Break and Dexter when that was on, so is pretty poor value really (we could get all the dvd box sets for the cost of a months subscription!), We can't get much on Freeview where I live yet but when we can it will be a question I have to ask myself, as SKY is expensive and you still get loads of f*cking ads and you still pay the licence fee and for the boxes. To be honest if it was just me, I wouldn't bother I think.

If you get your main reception quality (signal quality) over 60%, rain should not affect it even when it's heavy.

The software and crap boxes are more of an issue IMO.

Steve

quote:

Originally posted by bob mccluckie:
Mine has occasional drop outs and freezing. If it isn't the weather I don't know what it is.

Cheshire is served by Winter Hill transmitter which is <i>notorious</i> for not actually transmitting digital at a particularly high power. In stockport I get the same problem. Infact I don't even get one of the multiplexes at all. This could be solved by an aerial with a higher gain and checking you have a new aerial (Winter hill transmits using the so called W(ideband) frequencies which are a couple of channel numbers above the old analogue range and are not well served by old aerials (>10yrs).

The weak signal problem will be solved in 2009 (November) when analog is switched off at Winter hill and the power output of digital is increased (power is reduced to prevent interference with neighbouring analogue relays which may transmit at the same frequencies as the digital multiplex). This applies to all other transmitters too (including your Isle of Wight issue inparticularly I'd imagine since you're relayed from Portsmouth or Southampton if I recall and don't have a native feed but there are also radio licencing issues because of your offshore location which cause complications!).

www.mb21.co.uk is a useful site for information.

Digital TV transmissions are barely affected by weather (except perhaps lighting!). The frequency used by sattellite is very susceptible (the aerial for satellite is actually only 15mm - microwave frequency) and is in the LNB, the huge dish is to provide an immense amount of gain to the signal becuase it's diminished by the distance it travels, the medium it travels through and the signal spread). Microwaves are more easily absorbed (the energy in the wave causes heating) by water (think how a microwave works although this is a very specific frequency!) reducing the power by the time the antenna is reached. There are other things which affect it too. They're beyond me! Microwaves are a specialised subject.

I think I've got a bit too technical there. I might start misquoting if I continue. The point I should really make is that Digital TV is poor right now because the power levels are small so as not to disturb "legacy" analogue signals. This problem will go away when analogue signals are turned off and the transmission quality will be comparable to normal analogue on all multiplexes. Of course if you get rubbish analogue TV now you're situation is unlikely to improve!

If you are 30 miles away from a digital transmitter and it is heavy cloud and rain - then you have 30 miles of interference to contend with - with the satellite you have a much shorter distance of cloud to get through -

If you pay for Sky you may wish to see how your money is being spent. This is Rupe's latest toy.. Nice.

quote:

Originally posted by Derek Wright:
If you are 30 miles away from a digital transmitter and it is heavy cloud and rain - then you have 30 miles of interference to contend with - with the satellite you have a much shorter distance of cloud to get through -

Hii,
since TV signals are of particular interest to me being an engineer I looked further into this for you. Isle of Wight is covered by a transmitter (which is indeed a relay) which actually serves much of the south of England almost as far as London., not just the island. 20Kw far exceeds the 10(I think) kw output power of Winter hill which I pick up fine.

If you experience poor reception purely in bad weather then I'd check for water in your cable/connector (typically my biggest problem having lived in rented accommodation which has been shoddily kept up) because the dielectric changes if the co-ax suddenly becomes a pipe! There are no wideband transmissions in that area so an old aerial should provide sufficient coverage.

Failing those as a solution, this particular page is actually quite enlightening about the Rowridge transmitter:
http://www.aerialsandtv.com/rowridgetx.html
and notes the polarisation and the transmission group plus some topographical anomalies. I'd be interested to know how relevant any of this is to your location/equipment (I'm good friends with a broadcast engineer and we like to think about these things).

PS: don't confuse interference with attenuation!

Certainly Sky can be susceptible to rain and snow. Ensuring you've got a strong signal's a help, but also it's worth looking at where on your house the dish's positioned.

Mine sits between the slope of the roof and the chimney stack and as such is largely protected from the weather. Since repositioning it there I've not experienced any problems with reception.

Admittedly I'm lucky in being able to shield the dish in this way and still "see" the satellite, but I wonder how often the Sky installers pay regard to this factor when installing the dish?

Conversely I do get a problem with Freeview. There are some large trees in the field next to me and unfortunately the aerial needs to point at them. Fortunately this only really affects the ITV channels which I seldom watch anyway.

The guy who installed the Freeview aerial said that the transmitter power would increase when they turned off the analogue signal.

and I have a hill which is about 100 foot higher than my aerial less than 30 yards from my home in the direct line to Rowridge, on the top of the hill are a bunch of trees. The digital reception breaks up at the lightest hint of rain, let alone a full on rainstorm

The analogue reception locally was rubbish until a satellite/slave terrestrial transmitter was erected that we can see from the house - we will wait to see whether the local transmitter has to be converted to digital and how long it will take after the 2012 switch off of analogue TV.

I think that the further north you go the more it becomes a problem, Therefore, why the f*** are we goiing digital?

The further north the dish, the more horizontal the dish has to point so it has more atmosphere and clouds to reduce the signal strength to see through

Satellite reception tends to deminish as you move from the equator as the satellite's energy is spread over a greater area (much like sun's energy) hence for a given antenna size there's less power. Additionally, the satellite's footprint is ofter 'shaped' to the area in which it licensed to transmit to - this in not binary and so will roll-off at the footprint's edge requiring larger antennas. Fade due to antenna elevation angle makes some though not much difference to rain fade depth. Northern climates tend to have less intense rains storms compared to warmer climates, so often end up performing better.

Terrestrial signals are largely immune to rain absortion as the transmissions wavelength is significant compared to the size of a rain drop therefore not open to absortion and refraction. Not so for satellite. On the otherhand, satellite infrastructure costs are far cheaper, has much more bandwidth and does not suffer the ills of multipath, ignition noise etc.

The difference between a 80cm antenna and a 65 cm is about 1 dB of gain. If this makes a significant difference to your QoS, then I would say that the installation may be 'marginal' for a 65 cm antenna. Also this difference gain is zip compared to the improvement in coding gain in going from DVB-S to DVB-S2.

In my previous posting I mentioned the fact that my Sky dish has been positioned in such a way it's more or less sheltered from the elements and since being in this position I've never had problems with satellite reception. It's been in this position for three or so years.

To me this seems to indicate that poor reception in bad weather is more to do with rain or snow landing directly on the dish and interfering with the signal between this and the LNB than disruption to the signal as it travels through a rain or snow storm.