I get a very poor signal on Freeview (half way between two transmitters) so I have purchased a Humax 1100s smart TV freesat recorder. I will have to get a dish fitted but as the broadband signal is poor here as well, and my router is in a different room to the TV, I purchased AV 600 Powerline starter kit to work in addition to my Wifi instead of Ethernet cabling. Only thing is, my electricity is on a spur and not a mains system. So I am wondering whether the AV600 will work on a spur system or if I should take it back and get a refund? Any help would be very much appreciated.
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Those powerlines work on spurs, ring, radials etc.. but they are unreliable at best. You might get some decent luck with them but sometimes they will just disconnect or require repairing etc... You can always take them back as "faulty" depending on what issues you might have with them.
I assume you don't have a Sky satellite dish on your house as they can also be used for freesat, Or tried to see if a better aerial would allow you to get a better freeview signal?
I assume you don't have a Sky satellite dish on your house as they can also be used for freesat, Or tried to see if a better aerial would allow you to get a better freeview signal?
Thank you for your reply. No, I don't have a sky dish and I have had a Remote link A240D booster fitted and the aerial was tested as being OK, but around 8 pm each night the freeview signal still just breaks up which is very annoying. I am next to the coast so don't know if this causes the problem. Thank you for your help.
See the next thread. QUOTE: As to those units that use the ring final to be used for LAN signals they should be banned.
Read more: https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/erratically-acting-tv.477420/#ixzz4ZSAu7UEd
There is a good reason for this. Mains cabling is not screened, terminated, or balanced as it is not designed to carry radio frequencies. Thus when used in this way it radiates and causes interference to other radio users up to a kilometre away. Most affected is short wave radio but the latest devices interfere with FM and DAB radio, and I assume air traffic control which is on nearby frequencies.
So yes you should take it back for a refund but for a different reason than you thought. Use ethernet cabling, it is cheaper anyway and easier to hide than aerial or dish cabling.
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Hi Winston1,
Well, enough said! I read through all the comments from you and those you recommended also omega015's comments and am taking the AV600 back. I have purchased an Ethernet cable (cost a lot less too as you said) and have worked out a way I can run it without disrupting all the carpets. I think this is a much better way rather than it causing all sorts of problems. Thank you both so much for all your help, this is a bit of a minefield for me. Much appreciated.
Well, enough said! I read through all the comments from you and those you recommended also omega015's comments and am taking the AV600 back. I have purchased an Ethernet cable (cost a lot less too as you said) and have worked out a way I can run it without disrupting all the carpets. I think this is a much better way rather than it causing all sorts of problems. Thank you both so much for all your help, this is a bit of a minefield for me. Much appreciated.
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I note what you say about freeview, it may be due to weather, this time of year isotropic inversions or what CB's call skip is common. What happens is where the cold and hot air meets it forms a reflective tunnel, so a radio signal goes up into the inversion and travels for many miles before coming down, great except the TV aerial is often on a high point and on a mast so it works in reverse, it goes down to the inversion then goes many miles then up into space where no one can receive it. So really good for radio hams, but a pain for people watching TV.
The frequency used with satellite does not have this problem, the Sky satellites are close together and the dish is slightly oval so it can get them all, but there are also other satellites and question one is how many programs do you want? My son in law is Turkish so has a dish directed at Turkish satellites as well as British ones. The LNB is not a simple aerial but has commands sent to it to tell it for example what polarisation to use. So in the main every box needs one or two feeds (two if it can record as well as play) feeds from the LNB. I have a quad LNB so four cables into the house.
However you can piggy back receivers but second one is limited to signal the first has asked it to receive. So may be able to watch ITV and ITV 3 but not BBC Wales I never worked out what was bungled together, the problem is if the first box swaps channel the second box may fail.
This being on the same bungle also effects the electronic program guide, with SKY I have to admit it works well, you can go up to a week in advance, but other boxes are not as good, now and next seems to work with all the boxes I have, but where it falls down is record, my Ice Weasel box from Maplin needs the EPG to set the record function, if the program is shown the select it on guide and press record and all done, but without guide it's a real pain to set to record. It also does both freeview and freesat with same box, so very handy, got because it was HD.
As to moving signal to another room, you can use coax but it's a little hit and miss I find, it was OK if short run but no good for a long run, also screen size, watching on an old 14" in bedroom OK, but on a 32" screen leaves room for improvement, clearly you can only watch same program. With Sky boxes you can get a digieye and control box from other room, but not got that option with any of the other boxes.
In my house Sky fitted a dish at back of house, then latter refused to work on the dish because of health and safety even though they fitted it. So another dish was fitted at front of house, however not at top of house, it's on the bit that sticks out of the house being part of garage, I can access it from a pair of steps, having it lower down is really handy, be it adding more cables, or cleaning off the snow, it does not need to be high up, unlike freeview.
I want TV in my bed room in mother house and it is easier to fit second dish than run cables, high enough so no one walks in front of it is enough.
The frequency used with satellite does not have this problem, the Sky satellites are close together and the dish is slightly oval so it can get them all, but there are also other satellites and question one is how many programs do you want? My son in law is Turkish so has a dish directed at Turkish satellites as well as British ones. The LNB is not a simple aerial but has commands sent to it to tell it for example what polarisation to use. So in the main every box needs one or two feeds (two if it can record as well as play) feeds from the LNB. I have a quad LNB so four cables into the house.
However you can piggy back receivers but second one is limited to signal the first has asked it to receive. So may be able to watch ITV and ITV 3 but not BBC Wales I never worked out what was bungled together, the problem is if the first box swaps channel the second box may fail.
This being on the same bungle also effects the electronic program guide, with SKY I have to admit it works well, you can go up to a week in advance, but other boxes are not as good, now and next seems to work with all the boxes I have, but where it falls down is record, my Ice Weasel box from Maplin needs the EPG to set the record function, if the program is shown the select it on guide and press record and all done, but without guide it's a real pain to set to record. It also does both freeview and freesat with same box, so very handy, got because it was HD.
As to moving signal to another room, you can use coax but it's a little hit and miss I find, it was OK if short run but no good for a long run, also screen size, watching on an old 14" in bedroom OK, but on a 32" screen leaves room for improvement, clearly you can only watch same program. With Sky boxes you can get a digieye and control box from other room, but not got that option with any of the other boxes.
In my house Sky fitted a dish at back of house, then latter refused to work on the dish because of health and safety even though they fitted it. So another dish was fitted at front of house, however not at top of house, it's on the bit that sticks out of the house being part of garage, I can access it from a pair of steps, having it lower down is really handy, be it adding more cables, or cleaning off the snow, it does not need to be high up, unlike freeview.
I want TV in my bed room in mother house and it is easier to fit second dish than run cables, high enough so no one walks in front of it is enough.
Hi Ericmark,
Thank you for your reply, I managed to follow a lot of it but I'm not very technically minded. All I need is the freesat recorder with a dish fitted to serve the one main lounge TV with English channels. I have another (old) TV in the kitchen which I will leave to receive freeview as it will be too much trouble setting that up for freesat as well and besides, I only use the freeview on the odd occasion for news etc., when cooking (which is not very often!). The dish for freesat is being fitted Friday and freesat recorder linked up etc., so hope this will improve the signal for evening viewing. Many thanks for taking the time to answer.
Thank you for your reply, I managed to follow a lot of it but I'm not very technically minded. All I need is the freesat recorder with a dish fitted to serve the one main lounge TV with English channels. I have another (old) TV in the kitchen which I will leave to receive freeview as it will be too much trouble setting that up for freesat as well and besides, I only use the freeview on the odd occasion for news etc., when cooking (which is not very often!). The dish for freesat is being fitted Friday and freesat recorder linked up etc., so hope this will improve the signal for evening viewing. Many thanks for taking the time to answer.
They are not Sky satellites, they belong to SES Astra. They are indeed close together but at 23000 miles away the shape of a 45 cm dish makes not one iota of difference. Anyway a wider dish narrows the beam not widens it. The reason for the wider dish is for this very reason to reduce interference from satellites in adjacent orbital slots.
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I wish I knew more about free to air, freesat, and freeview receivers. I have around 10 TV's and boxes and other then when the two units are same make and model each seems to be different. I will admit always got cheap ones, but it's not so much what they do, as to each one is different.
The Panasonic TV we have at home has a really good Freeview guide, the only problem was it was forever saying it needed re-tuning however it was just press one button to do it. Mothers LG the guide was intermittent and when it asked you to re-tune it was a pain. All other TV's and boxes other than the Panasonic have rotten electronic TV guides.
As to satellite only the old Sky boxes have a good guide which will give you 7 days, every other box I have will struggle to give 7 days and often you need to be on the channel your looking at the guide for. My son-in-law has an expensive box, able to have multi-dishes connected, it will it wanted even connect to a motorised dish, I have to admit this box does have a good EPG so you clearly can get them.
My boxes also do not order programs as they are numbered with Sky or Virgin so when some one says have you been watching channel 123 it means nothing, however they do allow you to change order so ITV3 is next to ITV3+1, so not all bad. I can also delete all the encrypted channels I can't watch anyway.
Most the freeview boxes and TV's seem to have same order of channels, however the Ice Weasel allows you to change the numbers, and the Polaroid TV from Asda has 1 ~ 99 analogue and 100 ~ 599 as digital and you don't need to select digital or analogue so the Sky RF programs and freeview can be selected with single button. The Ice Weasel is the same between freeview and satellite, as standard freeview first then satellite before I start deleting rubbish looking at over 1000 channels, sounds good, but around 20 BBC1 channels as you can watch any region.
It really has moved to where like buying a car, you need a test drive. I remember having to get the TV repair man to fit more coils in the turret tuner to get BBC2, then latter them re-tuning your boxes so you could get Channel 5, today there are channels just to watch the crowds at Mecca, not talking about the Bingo hall. I had given up with Freeview for a long time, I looked at the channels and it looks good, it has ITV3 and ITV3+1 same as satellite, however with satellite there is something on ITV3+1 most of the time with Freeview it does not work.
I still use the old Pace Sky digibox before they had record built in, the numbers are the same as with the Sky+ HD box so easy to find what you want, and you can set it to auto change programs, one of our TV's does that too, I can look at what in on that night and pre-set evenings viewing. Well with Sky box whole week.
Some set top boxes make the TV into a smart TV with internet as well as satellite, that was the idea of getting the Ice Weasel box from Maplin, however with that one only internet thing I could get it to work with was the weather. I have a Bluray box however which will get most of the internet channels. It does seem to be pot luck.
The Panasonic TV we have at home has a really good Freeview guide, the only problem was it was forever saying it needed re-tuning however it was just press one button to do it. Mothers LG the guide was intermittent and when it asked you to re-tune it was a pain. All other TV's and boxes other than the Panasonic have rotten electronic TV guides.
As to satellite only the old Sky boxes have a good guide which will give you 7 days, every other box I have will struggle to give 7 days and often you need to be on the channel your looking at the guide for. My son-in-law has an expensive box, able to have multi-dishes connected, it will it wanted even connect to a motorised dish, I have to admit this box does have a good EPG so you clearly can get them.
My boxes also do not order programs as they are numbered with Sky or Virgin so when some one says have you been watching channel 123 it means nothing, however they do allow you to change order so ITV3 is next to ITV3+1, so not all bad. I can also delete all the encrypted channels I can't watch anyway.
Most the freeview boxes and TV's seem to have same order of channels, however the Ice Weasel allows you to change the numbers, and the Polaroid TV from Asda has 1 ~ 99 analogue and 100 ~ 599 as digital and you don't need to select digital or analogue so the Sky RF programs and freeview can be selected with single button. The Ice Weasel is the same between freeview and satellite, as standard freeview first then satellite before I start deleting rubbish looking at over 1000 channels, sounds good, but around 20 BBC1 channels as you can watch any region.
It really has moved to where like buying a car, you need a test drive. I remember having to get the TV repair man to fit more coils in the turret tuner to get BBC2, then latter them re-tuning your boxes so you could get Channel 5, today there are channels just to watch the crowds at Mecca, not talking about the Bingo hall. I had given up with Freeview for a long time, I looked at the channels and it looks good, it has ITV3 and ITV3+1 same as satellite, however with satellite there is something on ITV3+1 most of the time with Freeview it does not work.
I still use the old Pace Sky digibox before they had record built in, the numbers are the same as with the Sky+ HD box so easy to find what you want, and you can set it to auto change programs, one of our TV's does that too, I can look at what in on that night and pre-set evenings viewing. Well with Sky box whole week.
Some set top boxes make the TV into a smart TV with internet as well as satellite, that was the idea of getting the Ice Weasel box from Maplin, however with that one only internet thing I could get it to work with was the weather. I have a Bluray box however which will get most of the internet channels. It does seem to be pot luck.
So nothing to do with the footprint of the satellite, The power level of it's transponder or the location you are on the ground within proximy to it's target area then? Better LNB technology and higher power satellites that can target a rather specific area have make dish sizes smaller for us. Scotland may still use bigger that the now 40cm standard dish size. 28.2 Astra and 28.5 Hotbird are close enough.
The dish sizes for Sky digital have not changed since it launched.
I didn't suggest it had. I was saying newer satellites with smaller dishes can work at .3 of a degree difference. The sytem obviously worked since the original BSB wlith squariel and circular polarisation failed.
Not quite sure what you mean there. A smaller dish will have a wider beam angle but less gain. Different satellite clusters are typically 3 degrees apart (not .3 degrees).
Astra at the newer 28.2 and theres Hotbird at 28.5. Or am i miskaten?
They are the same cluster. As I said different clusters are typically 3˚ apart not 0.3˚.
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