UKC

Lots of people on here are far more knowledgable than I am at house/DIY stuff!!

Sunday TV works

Monday morning - no tv signal (the one that comes from an aerial, not the wifi/iplayer stuff.)

Have checked everything is plugged in in the tv room. No storm or anything overnight that may have blown the aerial off (and nothing has ever happened before in the 8 or so years I've lived in the house).

Any ideas what might be wrong? Or where I might start looking/investigating/fiddling. 

Thank you  

You could try this...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/check-for-transmitter-faults/#/undefined

I found the wire from my aerial had failed.

Thanks - I did look at that and seems to be okay.

Hi, thanks for the reply.

What does the wire failed mean? and do you know how I can check that?

(sorry for the stupid question but I really don't know stuff like this)

For a couple of quid you can get a very simple little battery powered box that should allow you to check if you're getting a signal.  Plug it in at the antenna, then at the end of the cable by the tv.

Do you have a signal amplifier anywhere?  Another little box that will be powered.  If this has died or has a fault it would stop the signal or if the power has died to it.

Finally it could be the receiver at the end.  Have you tried swapping the cable to a VCR, or VCR to telly to ensure this bit has not died?

Hope this all helps

Toby

Thanks Toby - Appreciate the reply. I will have a look!

I've had something similar and found out the entire cable had gradually become waterlogged. Seems like because of the internal insulation it was still fine until the soaking reached all the way down to the tv end of the cable, whereupon drips from inside the cable would short the signal. Needed to rewire it.

Check to see if it's the TV/aerial/cable by taking your TV onto the roof and connecting to the aerial with a new short cable.
Another thought, is that you've accidentally changed the input on your TV with the remote. 

This happened to us recently. There are three things to check:

1 - Antenna hasn't been pointed down by happy pigeons jumping on it.

2 - Cable insulation hasn't broken up under UV and allowed rain water to penetrate.

3 - Your local transmitter is moving off the 700MHz band and you need a new antenna. 

Our TV picture was pixellating badly and the answer turned out to be 3 above so we got a new, much smaller antenna - problem solved.

Thanks again, I will put that on the list to run through! Might well be 3 actually as have also had pixellating problems over the past few weeks.

Here's the explanation: https://www.freeview.co.uk/corporate/platform-management/700mhz-clearance

Bite the bullet and ask your local TV antenna bloke to come round.

i lost mine when wind turbines were built in line with the transmitter mast..

It physically failed. It ran down the outside of the house and the insulation went and allowed water in. Eventually the cable came apart completely and fell down.

Visual inspection of the cable if it can be managed... You could buy a small portable aerial and plug it in to rule out a problem with the TV.

I never got mine fixed because I have Sky and internet options.... 

You might simply be able to borrow a small indoor aerial with an amplifier (might need aerial extension lead to reach optimum position) just to check if the problem is with your existing aerial. Incidentally I had trouble with a damaged external aerial, we have good signal so I replaced with a high gain aerial inside loft which didn't need professional installers and should avoid future weathering problems.

I'd certainly try an auto re-tune of the TV; there was a sizeable channel re-jig at the end of November. I had to re-tune my TV to recover some channels.

We had a similar problem, BBC channels breaking up during wet weather. The problem was water getting into the terminal box on the aerial itself. Unless you have the proper roof ladders or access is easy I'd get an aerial man round to have a look.

Depends where you are in the country.  Changes relating to the 700MHz clearance, in which multiplexes move to new UHF frequencies, are being are done on a region by region/transmitter by transmitter basis, like the digital switch over (for those who remember that).  It's not really technically possible, or desirable in terms of managing the impact to viewers, to do the whole country at once.

AFAIK there hasn't been a major EPG shuffle (in which some channels change channel numbers, but don't actually move between multiplexes) for some while.  Most modern equipment can handle EPG shuffles gracefully anyway, without losing channels or requiring a re-tune.  It's usually older equipment, probably dating back to the digital switch over or before, that struggles.

To the OP: it's very likely to be a problem with the aerial downlead, such as water ingress.  If the aerial has been up there for at least eight years with no checks or maintenance then it would probably be a good idea to get it looked at anyway, if only as part of a general fault-finding and rectification process.  As others have said, get a properly equipped aerial technician in to do the external work, don't try it yourself.  If you have a local "recommend a tradesman" scheme then have a look see if there's one in your area that people rate highly - as with other trades, there are a few cowboys out there who should be avoided at all costs.  (I'm lucky in that my main aerial is in the loft, and my external aerial is on a flat roof, so I have easy access to both.)

We get problems when it’s high pressure and most of the aerial channels disappear. Although sometimes we can the get German television channels when this happens.

Thanks for the extra info everyone!

testing another tv shows the same problem, and changing the cable from the wall to the tv makes no difference.

So I'm leaning towards something wrong with the box on the aerial, or the cable - it appears that the aerial is on top of the (pitched) roof and the cable runs straight down the the outside of the house and into a vent brick (!!) under the living room (in which the tv is in.)

My Sony, only a few years old, and well after the removal of analogue, requires a re-tune. I had to do one last week. It's a pain in the arse.

I've also lost lots of channels in the past without the TV advising me of channel re-assignment. I did a retune on the off-chance, and channels were restored.

It's not the only cause, but it's a relatively simple thing to do to rule out one possibility.

I'd also check any equipment in the RF signal path (e.g. DVR), to make sure it's pass through hasn't failed. Plug the aerial feed directly into the TV.

That's fading, a multipathing effect caused by the very still air forming layers. The same thing also causes "ducting", enabling signals from distant stations to be trapped between layers and propagated a greater distance.

Water ingress doesn't bugger up the coaxial cable by shorting it, but by changing its characteristic impedance so it's no longer matched to the antenna or the receiver. In the longer term it will corrode the connectors causing an open, rather than short circuit.