Freeview problems with sound when changing channels!!

[Steve McF]

Hi all,

I wasn't sure if I could post this here, but I thought I'd run this past you.

My mum has a Hitachi LCD TV, probably 2 or 3 years old now, and she's been moaning to me about some little issues that I think might be down to poor Freeview signal.

One that is annoying that I haven't seen anywhere before is, after watching a specific channel for a while, if you change the channel, there is no sound, and a message comes up to say something like "Service unavailable".

If you change to any other channel, you always get this message and no sound, until you turn the TV off and on again, and then everything is OK.

Is this a fault with the TV (built in tuner), or the old aerial cable? The cable goes up to a new freeview aerial that is in the loft, but to be fair, they have had an aerial in the loft for as long as I can remember!!

I keep thinking that either:
a) the aerial needs to go outside on the chimney, or
b) the old aerial cable (30+ years old) should be replaced, or
c) both of these should be done

Has anyone got any ideas??!!

[sgould]

Sounds a bit like a weak signal.  I have a very old aerial that works OK with a cheap Argos Freeview box.  But my house is only 8 miles and in line of sight from Bedmond aerial. 

[mikeloadsasaabs]

If it's a new aerial, that eliminates one possibility from the equation. Depending on how easily you can access the aerial cable, I'd rig up a temporary connection from the aerial to the TV, perhaps using a shorter cable and moving the TV, and see if anything changed before you change the complete length of cable.

It's an interesting thought, as I sometimes lose sound on one of my channels that we get through terrestrial on our HD recorder, and the only way to recover is to retune the box which is annoying. Our aerial cable is the same age, perhaps older.

[phoenix]

It's not the most obvious of faults to be caused by a signal strength or quality issue; if it were you'd be suffering problems with the video as well. They are both transmitted together as part of the same data stream. There may be a utility in the Menu screens that will show you the signal quality & strength.

Having said that if the signal strength/quality is less than 70% (quality is more important than strength) then a new aerial would not be a bad thing.

It may be that if there is a an issue with signal quality dropping below the threshold, the set is not recovering well from a discontinuity in the stream. Bad design if so.

Sounds more like a potential problem within the set. Two things to try

a) perform a factory reset and a fresh channel scan
b) see if there is upgraded firmware available for the TV

[dw]

TRy retuning the TV  - this is an automatic process that will require delving into the menu structure. The Muxes may have changed in your area.