This Wednesday, 4th November is stage one of the digital switchover for our region. Stage two takes places on the 2nd of December.
For the first stage BBC 2 switches to the digital transmission – so if you haven’t switched to digital you’ll lose BBC 2. If you have freeview you’ll need to retune.
At stage 2 in December, the rest of the analogue channels are switched off. You’ll have to retune your freeview again.
Last week a transmitter in north east Wales was switched over and it strikes me that it’s affected our own telly here in Hoylake. We are now getting BBC 1 Wales and BBC 2 Wales rather than the northwest channels – is this happening to you as well? I’ve decided to leave the TV alone until after the stage 1 switchover and hopefully it’ll all sort itself out when I retune.
Actually, we have two televisions, our main one and a small portable in the kitchen that’s mainly used to check the football scores on teletext. The one in the kitchen isn’t receiving any signal at the moment because the cable became loose on the roof the other week in strong winds!
We replaced our main TV back in January, having had more than our monies worth out of the old one. I did try and sell it on ebay and give it away via freecycle but had no interest so it ended up at West Kirby tip. Apparently they take them away to be crushed up into tiny pieces. Our new Sony one (which is really great) has a freeview box built in so that freed-up the freeview box for use in the kitchen.
I think that you need two freeview tuners if you want to watch one programme and record another. We also replaced are old video player with a hard disc recorder – this has a freeview tuner built in. We find this new hard disc recorder to be much, much better than the video recorder …and there’s no more mystery about which tape was used to record that film the other night!
Remember that every TV in your house will need to receive a digital signal either via freeview, SKY, BT Vision etc.
If you’re leaving it fashionably late to get a freeview box then plenty of the larger supermarkets stock them and they’re widely available online at stores like amazon and John Lewis. I keep resisting Sky myself, but I know that if you join Sky TV online by 17 December 2009, they’ll send you a £50 Marks and Spencer voucher within 30 days of activating your viewing package.
Fingers crossed the stage one switchover runs smoothly tomorrow!
We are the same, from this mornings re tune we now have BBC1&2 Wales but we have also decided to leave it for now and see what happens! But one thing is for sure I’m not going to try to learn Welsh just to watch the local news!!
I have tried to do a manual tune but I am unable to even see a BBC1 northwest signal so we will have to wait and see.
Update: I have spoken to Chris Williams at our local electrical shop, Island Electrical about this issue and he gave me a quick work around for now that I have tried and this has sorted the problem. Chris recommends that you carry out an auto tune but have the aerial disconnected for the first 33% of the scan however on my Sony TV I had to have it disconnected for the first 50% of the scan before reconnecting it. Although at the end of the scan the report shows 105 services found and with the aerial connected the whole time it reported 133 services found I cant see any channels missing. I Hope this helps!
Try looking around the channel number 800. For me 800=BBC1 801=BBC2 …a temporary solution before I sort it out properly one way or another.