Picture breakup

Mike0001 said:
Thanks again, Graham.
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Affected once since 2008 but my dish is about 8ft from the ground protected in a narrow gap between next door and with a narrow view to 28.5/28.2E. A more exposed dish may well have more problems.

Only time will tell, interested to see how you get on in the future :).
 
grahamlthompson said:
Affected once since 2008 but my dish is about 8ft from the ground protected in a narrow gap between next door and with a narrow view to 28.5/28.2E. A more exposed dish may well have more problems.

Only time will tell, interested to see how you get on in the future :).
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Ours is on the side of the house just within the gable end and maybe 20' up, and exposed. I have had the sticky snow problem several times and lost the signal for a few days. We are at about 700' too, I guess no part of Redditch is that high. The snow lingers here longer than I remember it lingering when I was a teenager in Redditch. (1963 excepted.)
 
When I had rain trouble, I found a recommendation for silicone spray on the LNB face - it did seem to improve matters slightly, but I never tried it on the dish. This was in southern Spain, where snow, if it occurs, is a local wonder (should have seen the teenage girls taking phone photos of a 2 foot square patch a few years back - I missed a photo opp there)
 
I have in the past had trouble with Collared Doves perching on the LNB arm. They find that the support bracket behind the dish an excellent place to nest. When the Freeview signal was not strong in this area Starlings (we have a lot of them) perching on the aerial was a constant source of annoyance.
 
First snow, and total loss of picture despite the larger dish! :(

Freeview is fine. Long live freeview! :)
 
WightWalker said:
I occasionally get picture breakup which is a band of random pixilated colours across any part of the screen. It might just happen once or twice a night but on other occasions it can occur every few seconds.
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I am getting that occasionally with some of the more minor channels, and unrelated to snow/rain and with excellent signal quality and strength. I am more convinced now that it is in the signal, as switching to a mainstream channel caused it to vanish. It isn't like the poor signal breakup, your description is good, a strip of wrong pixels across one part of the image, the rest being OK.

The other day, I experienced it and also got a kind of inversion of the screen colours for a second. It looked like a negative. Is the stuff being transmitted in this state?
 
We had the same problems this week watching and recording the Bake Off on BBC2. Pixellated bands in random colours, negative image, etc. Just those programs, too, as far as I know.

Mrs Mike was not impressed! Could this be an early sign of disk failure? Our HDR was one of the first.
 
Mike0001 said:
First snow, and total loss of picture despite the larger dish! :(

Freeview is fine. Long live freeview! :)
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OK, had another go the other day. I tuned to CBS Action first, as it seemed to have a very weak signal and quality. Here was the Gotcha!

Last time, I aligned the dish on a strong signal, then went around tightening all the nuts and bolts and came down. Guess what? Tightening the bolts on the wall bracket had changed the tilt of the dish. It was pointing too low.

So, back to changing the elevation. I used the meter again and got a substantial improvement on that weak signal, but as soon as I tried to lock the elevation it went out of adjustment again. This must be a very poorly designed dish!

In the end, having memorized the pitch of the best signal, I adjusted the elevation by tightening one of the wall brackets, which slightly tilted the pole. Primitive, but it worked.

Changing the skew seemed to have no effect, so I put it back to where it was. I am now awaiting first snow...
 
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