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Not happy Gilmore, too hot for TV reception.

NSW residents are told hot weather was to blame for TV drop-outs last week.

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2014-01-20_0208Residents in southern New South Wales were told weather conditions were to blame for reception problems last week.

Locals in Shoalhaven began complaining to local media, ACMA and politicians after television reception for Prime, WIN and TEN began dropping out for several days last week. ABC and SBS were understood to be unaffected.

Federal Member for Gilmore, Ann Sudmalis said her office had been inundated with calls.

“When we have extremely hot or very cold conditions, the digital transmission wave is affected, disrupting the signal,” she said.

She referred to an Irish communications website which stated: “Disruption can also be caused by abnormal atmospheric and weather conditions; such disruption will only last while the conditions persist.”

Temperatures in the area reached 35 last week, well short of the 44 and 46 degrees experienced by Melbourne and Adelaide, respectively.

Sudmalis also said signal loss was partly due to the Federal Government’s restack of digital television services across the country. Services from the transmitter on Knights Hill have been disrupted as local stations prepare to be moved to new channels.

“Some TV channels are changing their frequency as the final step in the move to digital-only TV. You’ll need to retune your TV, set-top box or digital recorder when these changes happen in your area. If you don’t, you won’t be able to receive all free-to-air digital TV channels. The official public retune for Gilmore will take place in March 2014,” she said.

Retuning is taking place across Australia as part of the switch to Digital TV.

ACMA is understood to be looking into the latest problem.

Update: Media Watchdog to visit Southern NSW after TV signal complaints

16 Responses

  2. We had some minor break ups on SBS and TEN last night but nothing like this. There might have been some storms on the transmission area.

    The biggest problem with digital unlike the old analog system is when it breaks up you often loose reception completely instead of a bit of ‘snow’.

  3. @Adam x 2

    If what you say is correct, re the collaboration between the Networks, the Power Suppliers and possibly to some extent the Broadcast Tower operators, regarding going off grid during high demand periods etc.Given that most of our electricity bill increases of nearly 200% occurred prior the introduction of the Carbon Tax and where much of those increases have now been claimed as Suppliers ” Gold Plating ” their networks, does this mean they didn’t improve or add to supply capabilities, but instead renewed existing networks to top quality near new standards, so they could reduce maintenance staff numbers or even worse the increased revenue expenditure only occurred on paper.
    And have the general public been hit with another double whammy, in higher power cost plus digital conversion costs that can’t function on an Australian bloody hot day??

  4. Ask WIN Wollongong to look back into their 1970s logs and see how many times programs being taken off-air from Sydney were disrupted or just could not be relayed due to “temperature inversion” in summer. As the Knights Hill txs have a strong concentrated beam to the south, rather than an omni-directional pattern, NSW south coast viewers rarely had signal problems in analogue days. Now, new translators have been built to serve Nowra and still reception problems abound. The Knights Hill Prime and TEN signals often pixilate. Suspect is loss of incoming feed, thus, garbage in=garbage out=garbage into the Nowra translators.

  5. Stuff just the weather interference although ever since I’ve used digital STBs and the like about nine years ago the weather has always been a problem. That’s why I liked analogue back-up. As the picture may not always be perfect but there was usually sound and some sort of picture. My beef is what happens when the power goes out? With analogue there were portable TVs that worked in case of emergency. Like fire or flood. Now only analogue radio is reliable. So I really hope the ABC can keep at least one competent technology.

    By the way my little SBS situation where it currently doesn’t work. One TV when rescanned works. The other one that I usually use is still unwatchable. I’ve rescanned more than once. So I hope when I have to do it again on the anniversary of Black Saturday it works. Or SBS is off limits due to stupid frequency changes presumably.

  6. So to answer @David Knox question

    1. Transmitters can be switched off or put on off the grid. So we can run our airconditioners
    2. Digital TV allows for more transmitters and sharing the same frequency with
    3. Heat doesnt effect digital transmitters. Just the power network

  7. TX Australia and Broadcasting Australia operate most of the broadcast towers around the country. I was watching a youtube video yesterday with one of the technician being interviewed

    He’s explained that at the request of the power companies. They will offend run the transmitters on off the grid power from standby generators and potentially running them at half of the power

    Most digital transmitters services run at 5kw. If you have 3-4 transmitters at one site, Thats 20-30kw draw on the grid

    Most analog services ran at 10kws. Digital is much less and better because you can have transmitters placed in various locations on the same frequency

    Having said that if one of those locations most likely unmanned and remotely can be switched to off-grid

  8. That’s not really good enough, weather conditions can persist for days or weeks, meanwhile the rest of the country moves along with shows that a person may have been watching every episode of for years until now. This is Australia, if it can’t handle temps of 50 degrees don’t even bother.

  9. Pre-Digital TV, we the naive public were told that
    atmospheric interference would no longer occur with
    the new technology. I knew this to be a bogus claim
    at the time… As regards the ABC & SBS, I can
    normally get a strong reception signal without any
    form of antenna whatsoever, such is their signal
    strength & signal integrity. Truth.

  10. @David Knox

    Special request please, to ask ACMA why is it that ” Gilmore” can jump the queue?.

    What about all of us who experience these problems regularly, or is it a case if they do not ask if viewers are having problems there are no problems, or ask how many are happy with the digital switch over and does anybody intend to survey viewers, or a they relying on the divide and conquer principles and never collate individual calls/complaints to their dept’s.

    So if we do take these most recent claims as being gospel facts, my next question now becomes, are ACMA also ” Climate Change Deniers” because if believe the science and predictions, have we been switched over to a digital system that ” Will Eventually Fail” as “Abnormal Atmospheric and Weather Conditions, Become Normal Conditions”???

  11. Temperature alone will not affect receiving terrestrial TV signals. More likely something else in this case.

    Severe storms inc heavy rain or hail, smoke from fires and other atmospheric interference can cause problems while sometimes long distance propagation of VHF signals in particular on some summer afternoons might also result in some issues – although usually this simply results in your digital receiver asking to add more of the same channels from different areas.

  12. Sounds like utter ” Bull sh-t” and what about all the days of steady average temperatures, will they then try to tell us that digital works better if temperatures fluctuate or then blame it on barometric changes?.
    Its about time someone surveyed viewers Australia wide, because it is of little benefit to have extra digital channels that have not one iota of reliability other than the surety of constant drop outs or complete loss of picture/sound.
    The pre analogue switch off absolute con job by the Dept of Communications is still continuing, and they have the front/contempt to use exactly the same B/S of the fine tuning excuse(Years???). What next referral to ” Accredited Cooling System Installers” for our antenna’s and Tv receivers

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