I have got my SuperUniti up and running now, but not the Dab. I have two compact aerials, one of which was previously successfully operating on an Onkyo midi Dab system, and the other I just purchased from Amazon, a Bingfu DAB Telescopic Indoor Radio Aerial 75 ohm, the 36 cm one, and all I get is squelchy sounds, or the sound comes and goes.
Is the unit particularly fussy? The Onkyo worked fine with a little stubby thing not much more than 12cm.
Thank you.
The SuperUniti is not particularly fussy. You do need to get it to scan for DAB stations obviously, but presumably you did that. How many did it find when it scanned?
I would like to retune, not sure how yet, but I think it was about 70
You use the remote, press the spanner or wrench button and navigate from there. 70 doesn’t sound very many. Did you let it complete scanning? Even if it were 70, it should save those and you should then find them easily.
46 and sound awful
BBC services transmitter check for TD# ###
Sorry, our coverage predictions for this platform show the address is unlikely to receive a reliable service.
Well you could put up an actual external DAB antenna, but DAB quality is not good anyway so probably better to use internet radio?
Yes, I think iradio will be the answer, everything is there anyhow and it sounds great. Just hate having an idle function. I did have a Labgear dipole, maybe in the shed.
Could this be due to atmospherics, high pressure over the UK at the moment. We have been having some problems with TV reception over the last 48hrs and Mrs KJH mentioned the DAB signal in the car kept dropping out yesterday. Just a thought.
Very possinly, although I also have a Philips Dab radio/Cd/etc and it is receiving fine on a couple of feet of wire!!
Well I found my old labgear folded dipole aerial, and now it works just fine. It is an unsightly thing, but managed to fit it in the kitchen where it is not easily seen. The little aerials just don’t do it, at least not in this area, pity. No idea why my Philips DAB+ works fine with two feet of wire.
A nearby friend has the same complaint, and as my TV had no problems, I volunteered to check his out …. he has the wrong TV aerial.
TV transmissions have changed significantly over the last years, the result now is the whole UK only has two TV group aerials, A and K.
Group K will work everywhere if you live in a strong signal area, but if your area is specifically Group A and you have a low medium to weak signal or a problematic location, then you need a Group A.
Possible, but unlikely.. around the equinox periods, VHF and UHF signals can be affected by some called tropospheric ducting.. which allows the signals to travel much further so they can interfere with each other.. for example in East Anglia you can receive the Dutch and Belgian DAB muxes quite easily .. but not normally. However international cooperation designs mux frequencies not to over lap over quite large areas.
You are more likely these days to see your mobile phone signal become patchy if in urban areas when there is tropospheric ducting.
Back to DAB/+ receivers, signal reception can be very much affected by tuner front end sensitivity and quality. I no longer use my external DAB aerial as mux signal strengths have slowly increased in East Anglia. Apart from very forested areas and dips I find DAB/+ reception in the car pretty good now in east Suffolk with few dropouts.. (BMW receiver)
Indeed, these are the frequencies above DAB and below some 5G bands. It does occur to me if you have an average TV tuner, and an older Group T aerial that had wider bandwidth to cater for band transitions, it’s possible you might have desensing from a 5G mast in your aerial path reducing TV picture quality or reception.
Many moder TV aerials have a narrower bandwidth for just the A and K channels, and so out of band signals like 5G (that sit on some of the older DVB channels) are unlikely to affect.
Just so, if a TV aerial has been installed before 2010(ish) its an each way bet its its the wrong Group or at least could be a changed for something better.
TV transmission has gone through so many changes, plus the significant and many numbers of times per year channel changes requiring retuning during the intro of the many Freeview stations.
Then 2007 to 2012 and the staged regional switch-off of analogue TV.
Then the 2018 TV channel clear out for G4 (800MHZ) followed in 2022 by the G5 (700MHz) clearance.
This meams after 2022 only two Group TV aerials are needed nationwide.
Group K Channels 21-48 (470–694MHz)
Group A Channels 21-37 (470-606MHz)
Existing installed TV aerial groups are questionalble.
Groups B, E, T & W aerials that partly operate in 700 & 800MHz frequencies may require a LTE G5 Filter to operate without signal degradation.
Groups C & D aerials that operated only in the 700 & 800MHz bands require replacing
We had TV reception issues too during that high pressure weather system that sat around for a while. It became completely unwatchable for about a week and we resorted to using IPTV instead. With the change of weather it’s now back to normal.
Chris, if you are interested it’s not high pressure per se that causes ducting it’s a temperature inversion in the troposphere. (Lower atmosphere).
It makes VHF and UHF radio signals bounce along the the duct… sometimes over hundreds of miles causing radio/TV/mobile station co interference… this will be affected by the direction your directional aerial is pointing for TV
FWIW this is quite different from skywave propagation which relies on the sun’s radiation and the earth’s ionosphere which can bounce lower frequency VHF signals round the globe… but these are generally at much lower levels and are generally dependent on sun spot activity.
I think some people are completely unaware mobiles/5G can be affected by this [ducting], and perhaps wonder why their bandwidth is so low for a period.
As I say in my professional world, radio (including WiFi) is a medium with variable performance due to the wonders of physics and nature.
Hi Chris, this is something I don’t experience.
That said my TV aerial lives in the attic, plus it supplies 3 TV sets via best quality TV only band splitters. This is not ideal, but the aerial is the correct Group K and a log periodic.
Maybe check your aerial group against what your area should have. The coloured plastic caps on the tube ends tell you the group, red is Group A, grey Group K, everything else is wrong.
Thanks Simon, that makes sense in that our TV reception issues coincided with that period of settled weather with high pressure. I was about to go on the roof and check the condition of the aerial which I put on the chimney stack nearly 20 years ago. I’m pretty sure a storm pushed it slightly out of alignment recently, but now that the weather is back to normal this somehow seems a less urgent task.
Thanks everyone for the detailed explanations, interesting reading. Just for info, my tv reception returned to normal a day of two after my previous post, when the weather changed.