Are these the symptoms of a faulty tuner?

mike_m

mike_m

Active Member
I have a 9300T and a HDR Fox T2 and a TV sharing a common aerial, which loops through the Fox, then the 9300, then the TV. All have been working fine since installation - several years for the 9300, just over a year for the Fox. Both Humax boxes are tuned manually to my local transmitter (Hannington, 4 miles away and in line-of-sight). There are no channels above 800 on either box.

A couple of weeks ago I started to experience picture freeze and breakup on BBC channels on the 9300. The breakup affects live viewing and also recordings made since the problem began (but does not affect earlier recordings). Manual retune does not cure the problem. The Fox is unaffected, and continues to show and record programs on the PSB1 multiplex without any problems - as does the TV with its own internal Freeview tuner. Of course I've checked all connections and cables.

To make sure that I was not seeing intermittent loss of signal from the aerial I connected a second TV to the 9300, so that I could check both Humaxes at the same time. The breakup happens on the 9300, while the Fox is still showing a clear picture. I checked signal strength on both boxes at the same time, and notice that the Fox reports 100% quality, while the 9300 varies between 0%, 40% and 100% in a repeating cycle of a minute or so. Signal strength is at the usual for both boxes.

There is also a similar problem, though much less severe, with the COM6 multiplex. All the other multiplexes are fine.

I'm assuming that this is a faulty tuner - but why would this affect only one multiplex?
 

Attachments

  • s_Hum.jpg
    s_Hum.jpg
    238.1 KB · Views: 9
mike_m said:
I'm assuming that this is a faulty tuner - but why would this affect only one multiplex?
Click to expand...
It is more common for faulty tuners to just die. There have been a few recent reports of this behaviour on the 9300. One poster reported that a reset to default settings fixed the problem; perhaps worth trying.
 
Well, unfortunately a factory reset has made things worse - COM4 and PSB2 are OK, but it can no longer find any channels at all on COM5, PSB1, or COM6.
 
OK, sorted now, I think, though I'm still puzzled as to why only some multiplexes were affected. I decided to replace the RF loop cables, and while doing this I was surprised to find that both Humaxes and the TV get reasonably good SD reception even when there's no aerial attached, provided there's some sort of cable attached to the aerial socket - I guess that's because we're so near the transmitter. I found a problem with a connector on the RF cable between the Fox and the 9300, so I guess that the Fox was getting the full aerial signal, the TV was OK with the 3m of cable that loops from the 9300, but the 9300 only had a short (and faulty) cable from the Fox, which wasn't enough for a good signal. After replacing the faulty cable everything seems to be back to 100%.

Sorry to have bothered you with this.
 
Since the alert ref the september 3rd about EPG and channel changes I have auto-retuned twice. On both occasions the subtitles have been turned on for every channel.
I know how to turn them off but why has this just started to happen, think perhaps because after the first re-tune the details under the EPG had changed but not the channel changes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top