I have not had good television pick-up since I moved in here several years ago. One problem is the forest of antennas that have been put on the roof as each tenant had problems and which are shared with my neighbor in the other half of this place. They are a problem because there is no record of why they went in, which connects up to what wall plug or if any of them actually work properly. There is no way the landlord will be paying an antenna guy anytime soon

I set up my computer with a hybrid television card with dual tuners for analog and digital pick-up. Today I finally rebuilt all the cable connectors, worked out which cabling went to which plug in the wall and which one worked the best. The television card was totally retuned and the whole thing was working like a Swiss Watch. I was ill and have been for two days so I wasn’t feeling the best after working on that and went to sleep for half an hour. I fell asleep watching hi-def digital on all the channels and woke up half an hour later with nothing working on digital at all.

The channels that had been blocked were back up and running and the ones which had been deleted because they wouldn’t tune and were crashing the machine were back as well. Most of the ones that had worked were not.

That went on until about an hour ago and now I have some back. I rebuilt the connections and changed the way the amplifiers are positioned in the cables although that made little difference.

We do get really persistent interference here but I look at that timing and wonder if the neighbor’s TV is causing the interference or some of it. As for all of the changes to the settings, I dunno. It is difficult to find good reviews of some software and things so I have not been able to find much that helps there

Changing antennas has enabled me to get the ABC in all it’s glory (when the thing is picking up properly) but ABC seems to be the one that fails first and now there is no sign of SBS apart from on the analog channel set.

There is a kind of depressive quality to this constant inability to have things work correctly

Digital television is great isn’t it! Or it is until there is the slightest problem with the antenna or the connectors or if you live in an area with strong interference. Then the screen freezes and shudders if you can get anything at all. Personally I prefer a snowy picture to a channel that is unwatchable. It may not just be a matter of a cheap set-top box