back to article 4G interference will knock out Freeview

760,000 households risk losing Freeview when 4G telephony comes online, and even with mitigating techniques Ofcom reckons 30,000 households face a future without terrestrial broadcasting. The regulator reckons those 30,000 will have to switch to satellite or cable to get their TV broadcasts, as 4G telephony leaks into their …

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  1. Graham Anderson
    Mushroom

    not another Granadaland retune??

    Granadaland has already had two DTT retunes. The first one I was able to talk my 80-year old parents through on the phone. The second screwed things up royally and my mother was left with the Welsh channels in one part of the house - the bit she actually uses. The house is big, so calling out an aerial engineer is a complete pain and an unwanted expense. My poor old Mum had to wait for me to come visit (from That London) and even as a reasonably techie person, looking up the correct channel groupings for Granada TV as opposed to Welsh was annoying and confusing. Add into this the Chinglish inspired set-top box UI for manually changing the channels and it was a nightmare. As it turned out, there was a problem with the box as well, but the process was so confusing that I didn't know if it was a mistake I'd made, or if the aerial was completely incapable of picking up Winter Hill.

    With a new set-top box, we worked out that it wasn't the aerial at fault, but then with the new Humax I had yet another designed-by-autistic-engineers-in-another-language interface to wrestle with in order to tell the stupid box to tune into Granada and not S4C.

    If they're going to screw around with the retuning again, I may as well save myself the £100 train fare back to Liverpool and get a satellite dish installed. Oh wait, I can't because they live in a conservation area...

    AAAAAAAAARGH!

    1. Gareth Gouldstone
      Happy

      Thank God (or the council) for conservation areas

      Otherwise whole areas start looking like a Large Array Radio Telescope

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    RFI (Interference to you)

    Frankly it seems that the writer has no idea about radio. A proper band filter will chop out the signal at well less than 600hz, amateures do it all the time, just look at their repeater systems. Frankly if on a Frequency scope their transmissions should be stopped and them fined. I have to comply so why should not they and I go up to 12.5Kcs of my band edge. Sure if a TV antenna/ receiver has a poor filter, a filter will make a difference and sure if they were to live pretty much adjacent to the transmitter there may be a problem. But if they were to interefere with mine I would prosecute, maybe privately, one can still use the county courts, even for that.

    Interference is basically down to money, so you add the dots.

    1. Fr Barry

      Erm, no...

      "A proper band filter will chop out the signal at well less than 600hz, amateures do it all the time, just look at their repeater systems."

      The 144 MHz band uses 600kHz spacing but when you get up to 430 MHz we use 1.6 MHz spacing. At 1300 MHz this increases still further to 6MHz spacing. This is done with very expensive filters at the repeater site not at the "consumer" end of the link. The cost of installing cavity filters at thousands of homes would be astronomical plus, they will need regular retuning to maintain optimum filter shaping (dropping one will mistune it for example)

      Commercial operators use much wider frequency spacing because it is then possible to use cheaper filters (and they have the frequency allocations to do it.

  3. illiad

    Graham Anderson:

    WTH not invest in a decent cable system, or even a 'stealth' SAT system - many installers will paint on a 'brick effect' or similar, there is also a dish that is designed to look like a garden ornament, among others... surely they could help....

  4. illiad

    @Mike 137: clearer...

    a better way is ..

    a 'perfect' filter is a cliff, ie straight up!!

    most filters are a hill... the steepness depends on design and has other problems, like 'Pyers' said..

  5. illiad

    Peter Gathercole:

    I think he is saying "users who've plugged them into their own televisions" to to exclude those who have a box sitting doing nothing due to your brand new TV, or just not connected due to the freesat part only being used... there is a difference!!

  6. illiad

    what ofcom annouced *last week*...

    "C61, C62 clearange and the 4G broadband sale"

    http://www.ukfree.tv/fullstory.php?storyid=1107051813

    "Ofcom moves to protect Freeview interference from 4G mobile devices"

    http://www.ukfree.tv/fullstory.php?storyid=1107051834

    Oh, and tech heads please note that though the site has good info, the guys answering comments does not seem to do tech, hates links, and will ban anyone confusing him ... :(

    there is already a good forum here, and digitalspy.. :)

    http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1485127&highlight=4g

  7. reichert

    Free view failure

    I live in Blandford and we have our signal boosted from a transmitter on the isle of Wight for the last two months we have been unable to receive channels 3,4,5,6,13,14,28 we have retuned on a number of occasions and sometimes the channels disappear altogether I have talked to other households and they don't seem to have a problem we also get problems with high pressure and sometimes when its just sunny also we don't get a very good signal on Sundays which is pretty random can anybody explain this phenomenon.

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