An interesting problem with my parents TV reception occurred a while back.

My parents set-up was as follows. A high gain digital TV aerial on the roof,
pointed towards the Belmont transmitter. This fed into a 6-way TV booster in
the loft, which supplied TV signals to outlets in the 3x upstairs bedrooms,
2x outlets to the living room (front and rear) and to 1x outlet in the
back/dining room.

The TV booster had a Wickes badge on the front, but was manufactured by
Labgear. It was one of their older models which I had installed back in
1990, but the digital TV reception through it had been fine, up until a few
months ago....

Then one day, the reception went on several of the channels. BBC1 & 2 was
poor, but ITV and CH4 & 5 seemed OK. Checking the signal strength on the
sets, the strength was quite high (90%) but the signal quality was poor.
Even on the good channels, quality was only about 20%, despite the strength
being over 90%.

The one exception being the set in the back/dining room, in which the
reception was perfect and signal strength and quality were both around 90%,
which was odd.

I actually found that the reception on the other sets was fine when the
outlets where linked direct to the aerial and not through the booster.

Anyway, have replaced the old booster with a new one, think its a Tri-star
model, which I got from B&Q (think they're made by Philex?) and reception on
all sets is now excellent.

What I was curious about though was firstly, was this simply a case of the
old booster developing a fault, or or was it that they altered the digital
broadcast somehow (upped the power, changed the transmission frequencies or
something) a few months back that was causing some sort of interference with
the booster, due to its age? In either case, how come the reception was fine
on the set in the back room?

Any thoughts on this? Just trying to make sense of the anomalous results I
got.


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Best Wishes
Simon Taylor