On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 21:59:34 +0100
"Simon T" wrote:

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.



It could have been a solder joint on the booster's PCB gone bad.

--
Davey.