Analogue switch-off hits London today
Farewell, snow-filled pictures
Londoners: don't forget to retune your Freeview kit today, be it a set-top box, a telly with an integrated digital tuner, or a tuner dongle or card hooked up to a PC.
Ditto, if you own a BTVision or TopUp TV box.
The Crystal Palace transmitter, for years the capital's main source of TV signals, will begin cutting off stations' analogue transmission today in favour of digital streams.
Today, it's the turn of BBC Two, which will no longer be transmitting in analogue form by the end of the day, and Arqiva, the company that runs the spun-off terrestrial TV transmission infrastructure will be upping the digital signal strength of all the BBC digital channels to "reach all areas".
Two weeks from now, all the other analogue channels will be turned off and "the remaining digital channels [will] become available in all areas".
That will warrant a second retune of your reception equipment. Or you might simply decide and wait until the switchover is complete and retune then.
You can get more info at the Digital TV Switchover site. ®
COMMENTS
Farewell, snow-filled pictures
Welcome, pixelated digital pictures.
Re: analogue / analog ?
Its not that one is correct and one is not. Typically the analogue is British, as its origins are french and that;s how the french spell things!
However, when used technically, many standards use US English. The most obvious being a Computer Program.
I've been coding for 30+ years now. I still manage to switch between colour and color seamlessly tho. between normal writing and writing of code.
Often many of the US spellings are closer to old English spellings, so are more 'english' than our (British) spellings. Don't tell any Daily Mail readers that tho.
Re: analogue / analog ?
> "Anyone know the definitive distinction between the two spellings?"
Yep. In this country it's "anorak".
Hope that helps.
Harlow
The town I live in, Harlow, has legal problems. Many properties have a covenant that prohibits the erection of aerials or dishes, having been originally provided with a council-run community aerial system.
That system was transferred to a cable TV company which is now owned by Virgin and they're maintaining the distribution via their own cable. Virgin now want money to supply Freeview channels over the system. The old analogue will only continue until the end of the year, and then you either pay for digital cable TV as an individual, or hope that you don't have a neighbour from hell who will enforce the covenant. Thankfully, the council dares not enforce the covenant.
Building a community distribution system makes sense but only if it's run by the community and that any covenants work both ways or can be terminated.
Farewell analogue
I was looking at some screen grabs I took from live TV on my old Amiga the other day and the colour and clarity was fantastic. No MPEG artefacts and no noise despite living 35 miles from the transmitter.
Now on DTTV some of the channels look almost like a webcam.
