"The Natural Philosopher" <t...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:sqsvqa$afc$1...@dont-email.me...
> On 02/01/2022 17:51, NY wrote:
>> I'm wondering whether it's not so much a reception problem as a
>> USB-transfer problem, either from tun
> Any windmills around? play havoc with radio and TV reception..
My terrestrial reception is remarkably glitch-free despite the hill about
500 metres from our village which blocks what is otherwise perfect line of
sight, although at about 75 km range from the Belmont transmitter. I was
warned that I'd probably have problems whenever there was an atmospheric
"lift", causing distant transmitters on the same frequencies to interfere
with the ones from Belmont. But I've not seen any evidence of that -
reception does not get worse at certain times of year or during certain
types of weather.
The only time I had exceptionally poor terrestrial reception was just after
we moved to our house. I noticed that in an evening that one multiplex (but
no others) started producing horrendous amounts of continuity errors. I'd
replaced some tungsten GU10 light bulbs in my study (which is directly below
the aerial) with LED ones. I should have realised that the problem dated
from that time, and that it always started *after dark* when I'd turned the
study lights on. Once I went round turning everything off one by one, and
realised that it was the lights, I quickly traced it to one rogue GU10 which
was apparently kicking out lots of crap at about 482 MHz (Belmont's PSB1
mux). Surprisingly, COM5 on 490 and PSB2 on 506 were not noticeably
affected. I swapped that GU10 with one from another part of the house
(further away from the aerial) and have not had problems since.
Satellite reception is fine, apart from in very heavy rain - when I force
TVHeadend to record from terrestrial versions of channels, if I remember to
check weather forecasts.
I get the distinct feeling that it is a problem with the Pi or the tuners
rather than the signal that is being fed to them, because it seems to happen
more often if I'm recording from two or three tuners at the same time, and
when it happens it almost always affects all active tuners. If it was
reception conditions, I'd expect terrestrial to be fine when satellite was
glitching, or vice versa. I've checked that at times of glitches, the TV,
fed from another LNB on the same dish, and from another leg from the
terrestrial aerial amplifier, is glitch-free, and that if I swap the two
satellite/aerial feeds (between TV and RPi tuner) the problem stays with the
RPi. So it's not LNB or cable.
Also there is the fact that rebooting the Pi, even without turning off its
power or that to the satellite LNB, always cures the problem for a few
days/weeks. I suppose I ought to set up a cron job to reboot the Pi in the
middle of the night (avoiding the time when TVH updates its EPG).
I'll try Jan's /bin/echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches as a manual command
(with sudo) next time I detect a problem, firstly to check that it doesn't
cause problems at the moment of execution and secondly to see if the
glitches go away (ie that TVH's Status|Stream doesn't report any *new*
continuity errors).