Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Sutton Coldfield digital switchover

Tomorrow is phase one of the Sutton Coldfield switchover. Now the easiest method to retune is to tell the box do it automatically - it'll overwrite all the old channels with the new ones. However if your aerial happens to be able to pick up two different transmitters (like mine) that means getting duplicated ghost channels and for me they come in on a first come first served basis meaning that the strongest signal isn't always the one that gets assigned the right channel number. I therefore chose to do a manual retune and for that I require the new channel numbers.

Do you think I can just find a simple list of them? Hah! A full list of all the channels has been produced by Ofcom.

The current channels are 41, 44, 47, 51, 52, and 55. 34 being HD.

on the 21st they'll be 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46,  with 40 being HD

Great so what will they be on the 7th? Well I know the Mux that was 41 will be moving to 43. But SDN will be moving to 41. Excellent which channel is SDN? That would be the current Mux A which is 47. So is that a move or a concurrent run with both 41 and 47 displaying the same channels? Um? Assuming it's a move to keep the number of channels the same then the list for the 7th looks like this:

41, 43, 44, 51, 52, and 55. With 34 staying as HD

In the end I contacted the digital switchover people on 0845 50 50 50 and she gave me the list. Well to be precise she gave me the current list and I had to point that out. Scrolling down some more and I received confirmation that I've got it right. Sheesh what a pain though.

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