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UK Digital TV Platform Freeview blames weather for TV problems:
Digital TV platform Freeview says that people around the UK are experiencing reception problems because of high-pressure weather conditions.
Freeview's free-to-air channels include those from the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV.
The website Downdetector has nearly 5,000 comments from viewers reporting that they can't access channels at all, or that the picture is distorting.
[...] it isn't the high pressure itself which causes interference with TV signals. It's the presence of what is known as an atmospheric temperature inversion. A temperature inversion is when a layer of warm air overlays cooler air at the surface. Temperature usually decreases with height above the earth's surface, but when there is an area of high pressure, the air aloft sinks down towards the earth's surface and it warms up as it does so.
This creates a sharp thermal contrast in the atmosphere which TV and radio waves see as a physical boundary. There are many TV and radio waves travelling through the lower atmosphere and in such atmospheric conditions, these waves can be refracted or bounce off the inversion overhead and this enables them to travel much further than they would otherwise be able to.
In this way, the usually strong Freeview signals can experience significant interference with other, normally distant, signals from other sources.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:54PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kazzie on Tuesday December 31 2019, @05:45PM
In the days of analogue television, I recall our reception of BBC2 (on UHF channel 63) was always a little fuzzier on summer evenings. You could still make out what was going on, though.
The trouble with digital is that as soon as the signal quality drops below the error-correcting threshold, the picture gets very garbled. Over the past few days, the audio of affected channels was up the creek too, making them thoroughly unwatchable.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday January 01 2020, @09:27AM
From the country that brought you "the wrong kind of snow", we now present, new for 2020 [drum roll in background]...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:43PM (3 children)
It is no secret that temperature inversion exists (it is the typical smog weather). Therefore if it causes problematic interference, that just means that it was not accounted for by whoever allocated the frequencies.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:54PM (1 child)
You have to have frequencies before you can allocate them.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 31 2019, @05:07PM
Well, the frequencies exist naturally.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 31 2019, @05:25PM
Oh, it was accounted for. And then sold off to cell phone carriers, because consumertards all have to have their perfect, precious, brain-melting, stupid little cell phones.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday January 01 2020, @10:01AM
Cloudy? reception down
Sunny? reception downp
Pigeon on the antenna? reception down
for what? 100 channel of crap instead of 10 of sometimes interesting crap.
DTV is the metaphor of optimization going wrong. Same as what happened to economy.
-Supermarket is so cool I spend less!
-Dad, lost my job, the shop closed down and the supermarket buys from the other side of the planet.
In both cases the outcomes were easy to predict but interests made the change happen anyway.
Account abandoned.