A mammoth undertaking

I watch very little television these days. I’ve never really been a huge consumer of TV, and tend to spend my down-time playing with Christopher’s iPad rather than sitting in front of the box. But when Malvern went over to digital Freeview last autumn, I dutifully (if somewhat grudgingly) bought a digibox and set it up. However, sometime around Christmas it stopped working. That wasn’t a major problem, as I could catch up with the one or two programmes per week that I actually wanted to watch by using iPlayer on the iPad. So I didn’t bother trying to sort it out.

Then, a few weeks back, my sister and her boyfriend came to stay for the weekend. She is a huge rugby fan, and the Six Nations was on. Even more to the point, it was the Calcutta Cup between England and Scotland, and she wanted to watch it! I tried doing a complete reprogramming of the digibox, but it complained that there was no signal found. It appeared that there was a problem with the aerial, but I didn’t have the equipment or know-how to trace the problem back any further.

I’ve been doing some stupid hours again at work recently, with all-day, off-site meetings several times a week. So I’ve got plenty of hours in hand, and decided to take today off as flexitime before the madness starts again next week. I took the opportunity of calling out the local aerial repair company to have a look at the problem. The technician quickly diagnosed that a 10-year old power supply box had failed. It supplies 12V up the aerial to the amplifier on the roof. And with no power, the amplifier obviously wasn’t working and the signal was very degraded, below the level that the digibox was able to decode.

It doesn’t help that my aerial is pointing over (or rather through) the hills to Sutton Coldfield and so gets a very weak signal that is refracted over the Worcestershire Beacon rather than direct line-of-sight. So it needs all the amplification it can get. There is a potentially more convenient transmitter, at Much Marcle near Ledbury, which is at least on the correct side of the hills. In winter, I get direct line-of-sight to it, and the signal strength today was stronger than the one from Sutton Coldfield. But there is a large wood in the way, and in the spring and summer when the trees are in full leaf, the signal is dreadful. So the poorer but more constant signal is the better choice overall.

Once the problem had been diagnosed, it was a five-minute job to replace the broken power supply with a new one and reprogram the digibox. I now have a working television, in time for the England-Wales match tomorrow……