TV station tuning and the Welsh conspiracy

Following several reports of difficulties which have occurred with some TV receivers in the Audlem area following the start of the TV digital switchover process, Audlem Online has been trying to find some information about what is going on.

There is a good informative website about the switchover process and problems arising from it at digitaluk click here" rel="nofollow">click here.

This website suggests that in this area we have had a partial switchover (as from November 4th) but we are now in a phase where the Welsh transmitter (Moel y Parc) gives a better signal in some cases than the NorthWest transmitter (Winter Hill). This means that when they auto-tune, some receivers may choose to use the stronger (Welsh) signal.

On December 2nd this situation is due to change again when the NorthWest signal becomes dominant and receivers may well auto-tune back to using that.

If at the end of the process, the channel which is auto-selected is not the one preferred, it is apparently usually possible to retune the receiver manually. The problem with this is that this manual tuning will be lost again whenever automatic retuning takes place.

There is a pdf file containing information about the manual retuning process on the digitaluk website – click here" rel="nofollow">click here.

It must be stressed that we at Audlem OnLine do not claim to be any kind of experts on the vagaries of TV tuning – if anyone out there can give us a better explanation of what is going on and how to get round the resulting problems, then we would be delighted to hear from them.

Added at 8.30am Peter and Christine Silvester says: "We have a TV that has been infiltrated by forces over the Welsh border, but have found on ours that in the retuning process, Winter Hill BBC North West programmes were stored as 800 for BBC1 and 801 for BBC2.

"Worth trying on other TVs, perhaps."

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.