UK TV goes all digital, analog TV shut down

[wa2ise]

http://www.tvtechnology.com/europe/0...-the-uk/216060

The UK just finished their transition from analog TV to digital, like the USA did back in 2009.

[Geoff Bourquin]

I wonder how many people over there lost over-the-air TV when analog shut off. I lost most of mine when we shut off analog, although I still pick up all of the Canadian stations I had before their analog went away; probably because I can see where most of those. stations are from my roof.

[MK1234Tfan]

We lost every single channel in our area. I really think it was a costly unneeded move.

[Jeffhs]

I live near Cleveland. Every TV station in my area changed to digital as well. However, I found that in my area (actually 35 miles east of Cleveland) the DTV OTA reception is very good, even with an indoor antenna. We have channels 3, 5, 8, 19, 25, 43, 55 and 61 here. With the small DTV antenna, I get every station except 8 and 19 (the subchannels of which, Antenna TV and MeTV, respectively, are the two channels I watch the most), and the reception is just great on the stations I do get. I found out the reason why I cannot receive 8 and 19 on my DTV antenna is that these stations' DTV assignments are on VHF channels, which of course the UHF DTV antenna won't pick up. Worse, I found out that the only way I could receive the two DTV stations on VHF channels would be to use a large outdoor antenna, which is out of the question for me as I live in an apartment building. The building is wired for cable, however, so I can get every station from Cleveland and two other, smaller cities, as well as the usual national cable networks like CNN, ESPN, TBS, TNT, and so on. I don't watch cable that much, though, since I have a collection of DVDs and VHS tapes of old shows and movies, a lot of which aren't even on cable anymore and may not return for some time, if they ever do.

[Celt]

All over the air transmissions stopped here...but the cable companies are still offering standard analog service as well as digital. So the change didn't make any difference to me. What I found funny was how many people I saw throw their old TV's to the curb for no reason.

[W3XWT]

Seems that DTV works fair where the stations are on tall towers.

However, at my farm in S.C., where rabbit ears was all that was necessary to get City grade reception of 3 V's (WJBF-6,WIS-10, and WRDW-12), all I now get is one U, (WJBF-42) All three stations transmit from their analog sites (Beech Island, SC for WJBF and WRDW, and Elgin, S.C. for WIS) with WJBF running 1 MW (was 100KW visual on 6), WRDW 20.2 KW (316 KW visual when analog), and WIS running a blazing 57 KW (316 KW visual when analog).

As for "line of sight", at my residence in Virginia, I can stand on the roof of my house, and on a clear day see the the 4010 Chesapeake St. N.W. tower with channel 7 and 9 on it. I can hold my Haier portable TV in my hand and not get a reliable signal off either station!

I hope DVB-T and ISDB-T work better for our friends overseas.

OTOH, is it possible to dump COFDM into our U.S. sets and shift gears?

[MK1234Tfan]

Ya I've tried analog rabbit ears as well as an indoor DTV antenna and get nothing. We used to get all kinds of channels on rabbit ears before the DTV transition.

[Penthode]

In the UK, the original implementation of DVB-T was problematic. There were areas in London where the digital signal was very unreliable whereas the analog was fine.

The problem was mitigated to an extent by changing the modulation parameters. Hence the channel maximum bitrate was reduced from 24Mb/s to about 20Mb/s. Remember that the UK uses an 8MHz wide channel now for only 20Mb/s and the US and Canada have 6MHz wide channels carrying 19.39Mb/s.

The bottom line is that 8VSB is spectrally more efficient than DVB-T or ISDB.

On the otherhand, Europe is upgrading to DVB-T2 which improves performance. And ATSC v2.0 is on its way.

As far as reception is concerned, with an outdoor antenna, I was able to consistently receive fringe DTV signals 80 miles+ better than analog signals. It is a matter of using the correct antenna and using a good DTV receiver.