Been there, done that...

At the Welsh village of Ferryside and at Whitehaven in Cumbria the broadcasters dipped their toes in the waters of Digital Switchover. Even at Selkirk in the Scottish borders it seemed somehow to be a dress rehearsal, but with Beacon Hill, above the English Riviera in Devon, it suddenly seems more real. The Digital UK publicity machine cranked itself up a gear and told us that all was well and everything went smoothly.

But PARAS has been speaking to the trade in Torbay and asking...

How was it for you?

"From a media / Digital UK perspective the switchover probably has gone smoothly - I've been asked by customers 'how do I complain?' - and have only been able to suggest that they contact their local paper.

"Bill Taylor's recent screening on BBC1's regional news programme Spotlight seemed to really annoy my customer today - she was disappointed that he wasn't grilled a lot more about the problems that have been reported, and was allowed to get away with dismissing them as 'minor teething troubles'.

"In general, the older viewers were happy with just four channels and would have preferred to keep the analogue signals "as is / as was". I've been asked to reduce the extensive programme list to just
the first five for customers who just can't cope with the huge selection.

"The other perennial issue is the difficulty of reading what's on the remote, and then having to look at the TV screen to see what option to choose next (reading glasses then distance vision). Pressing and holding number buttons has also been a problem - some elderly folk just aren't used to the repeating function when holding a button down and get 111 or 11 instead of 1 etc."

TIMING

"Most people thought that the switchover would be a "one day" event, happening on the 8th April. When they discovered that they'd only lost BBC2, they thought 'that's OK, I can manage without that'. All the posters that were attached to lamp-posts gave no indication of any second date and these were removed prior to the 22nd April, with nothing further provided. Consequently, it was only the local news that carried
any indication of when 'DSO2' was due, and that seemed a bit low-key to me."

"I had a bunch of calls between 8-22 April where folk were convinced their aerial was faulty and asking for a new one. A quick check on the meter showed perfect signals on all channels. What had happened is
that they'd lost BBC1 and BBC2 digital programmes and either not re-tuned at all (didn't realise they had to) or not re-tuned properly (done an "add channels" instead of a "replace channels" and not realised that their
"missing" BBC1 and BBC2 were hidden somewhere in the 800 numbers)."

"Another issue is "digital echo". A recent visit to a cottage near Bovey Tracey had a main TV on in the lounge and another on in the kitchen. A delay of at least one second was evident between the two, despite both being on BBC1. This turned out to be because the Sony digibox in the lounge had taken the Stockland Hill transmitter for the BBCA MUX (despite all the rest being from Beacon Hill) and the Panasonic integrated TV in the kitchen was using all Beacon Hill MUXs. The delay was reduced back to a conventional "echo" when the Sony box was manually retuned for Beacon Hill only. The Stockland Hill signal was far ahead of the Beacon Hill signal."

This is only a temporary issue. After Stockland Hill DSO the two transmitters will be back in sync.

CUSTOMERS BUYING THE WRONG EQUIPMENT

"This seems particularly to have caught out folk whose TV set has only a single SCART socket, and who who have bought a digital tv recorder with just a single tuner. They've been advised by shops / friends etc. that it will be fine, only to discover that they can't watch a second channel whilst recording something. They then get a second (cheap) digibox, and attempt to use the SCART loop-thru on the PVR, which doesn't work when the PVR is recording! Their local shop then recommends that they buy a new LCD integrated TV set!"

A SCART swithbox would solve this problem, This needn't be complicated for the user as auto-detecting switch boxes are available

THE HELP SCHEME

"I've had very limited feedback but haven't heard anyone complain about it yet. My concern is with the jobs being done in alarmingly short times (been observed) and with the installers fitting loft aerials instead of outside aerials (and having little or no equipment on their van to enable them to do outside aerials). I suspect that there's no attempt to provide "in spec" signals in any of their jobs (something even Sky do insist on).

AERIALS

"I've not had a single instance of anyone having reception problems where the aerial needed replacing so far - coverage does seem to be significantly better than with analogue.*

POOR RECEPTION SPOTS

"All of these have eventually come good. It's been nice to get some of the worst areas finally up and running with a good clean digital signal."

TRANSMITTER OVERLAP

"As expected, significant overlap has occurred in lots of places. The impact is entirely dependent on the owner's equipment, though I suspect that many folk have yet to realise that they have a combination of some "good" signals and some "poor" signals and even if they do, they probably won't know why that is or what they can do about it."

There has been a particular problem in Torquay where coverage of the Torquay Town relay station has been extended and now puts in a good signal level to installations in the town which have aerials on the Beacon Hill main station. Because the Torquay Town relay operates on lower channels than Beacon Hill these signals are being found first when people retune their boxes. The better, cleaner signals from Beacon Hill are found but the set top box stores them in the 800s. thus necessitating a manual retune. The public cannot be expected to know or understand anything about this.

DODGY BOXES

"There have been some set-top boxes that have had to be replaced which are 8k compliant but which don't allow manual tuning. Torquay Town with its new antenna is romping into places it never used to. With MUXs on channels 41 and 44 being adjacent to Beacon Hill's 42 and 45, these boxes have picked the relay signals first and put the "good" signals in the 800 programme numbers. Customers don't like that and are opting for a new box instead. The manual tune ones do seem to be working fine.

It would seem that by increasing the coverage of the Torquay Town relay the broadcasters have shot themselves in the foot here and created more confusion

One of the less publicised aspects of DSO is that the new post-DSO transmissions are not only stronger, but they also use a different transmission format. Pre-DSO trmnsmissions use 2k (2000 carriers) for each signal, whereas post-DSO there are 8k (8000 carriers). Virtually all newer set-top boxes and IDTVs (integrated digital televisions) can receive the new trnsmissions, but inevtably there are a few older ones which can't...

"I had an updated list of 2k only set-top boxes and integrated TV's from Digital UK on the 18th April (the list is dated 17th April). Whilst I'm grateful that Digital UK are providing some information, it would be nice if I wasn't discovering other digiboxes that are 2k only and aren't on the list (e.g. Pace DT210F and Goodmans GDB3 - old version with reset button on the back). Pace were very quick at responding to my Email and confirmed that it should be on the list. Goodmans haven't responded yet - I've tried a firmware update which went OK as a process but failed to get the box to work. Sony have also failed to respond - a customer has an integrated TV which is on the Digital UK list. This requires a firmware update which could have be done by a 3 hour! OTA transmission (but wasn't - presumably Sony didn't book any slots for that). The customer has been advised (after lots of chasing on his part) that a Sony service agent will visit with a PC download at some stage - he has to pay the agent and then claim the expense from Sony (seems like a mad arrangement to me).

"There have also been a couple of instances of 8k boxes (one Philips, one Matsui) being capable of retuning to the new MUXs and displaying a good picture, but then being unable to "hold" onto these settings when powered
off, and either losing all the TV channels (Philips) or reverting to the "old" 2k listings (Matsui). Appears to be memory chip troubles rather than aged electrolytic capacitors (no back up battery or equivalent in these)
and have required new boxes as a result.

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