DISAPPEARING FREESAT

Has your dish moved? Have you a large enough dish to get the channels? 

Ours are working fine. BBC are going all HD and scrapping the SD channels so they will no longer work unless you have a HD box to collect them. We get odd ones that we can't get all the time but changing the postcode can help. For example, using a Midlands postcode we couldn't get C4 HD so we now use a London one. It means we get all the channels except ITV HD but they are still on SD so it doesn't matter so much.

With the BBC change, if you have a box like Humax then they will automatically retune to the new channel. Other boxes won't and you have to do a manual rescan to get them.

Hello

I had this explanation from a techno mechanic years ago.  Twice a year, morning and afternoon, at the same time the sun is passing the satelitte and blocks the signal. Mine  goes off at exactly 11.0am for about 9/10 minutes. It wont last long but dont adjust anything as it will pass * (like the sun haha)

Not very technical but it should explain

Cheers

Elinspain

Thanks for the very rapid responses. Having previously messed with the settings I now leave it till it comes back on its own.

I still have my Humax box set to my home postcode which is in Dorset.  I know that channel 161 which is BBC South is on a Sky channel and does not work. I tend to tune to 962 which is South West as it stays on quite well.

Are you saying that if I retune the Humax box to somewhere down in Cornwall it will work on channel 101 and be in HD?  We used to live in Falmouth which had a TR10 postcode. With my old eyes I can't see the difference between SD and HD!!

It is unlikely my dish has moved unless we have had an earthquake as it's bedded in 4ft  of solid concrete.

Whatever postcode you put in it will put the regional BBC1 HD on channel 101. If it's Humax it should have done that automatically.

As stated above mine disappears at the same time most days.

That should only happen twice a year, not daily. None of ours disappear although we lose channels like Dave, Drama and Yesterday during the day and virtually all of Summer. I'm told they are very weak channels anyway but we get them perfectly between about October and April. 

Thanks again for all the comments.  I'll have a go at putting in the TR10 postcode instead of the BH20 and see if I get BBC1 SW in HD.  It's worth a try since nothing is on 101 at the moment.

We are in solar outage time.

The sun passes behind the satellites and swamps out the signals. Signal levels drop, and the weaker channels (those on the uk beam like bbc itv c4 fives uktv discovery / quests) disappear.

This can be for up to 30 minutes for about 2 weeks, in March and October time.

For the UK TV Astra 2 satellites this is around either side of 11am. It will affect all satellites, but at different times depending which satellite group you are using.

Nothing you can do about it. Changing postcodes / regions will not do anything

So I have tried to change my postcode as there is nothing currently on 101.  There is nothing on the remote or settings menu that lets you do this.  I can see the current postcode but can't get in to change it.

The only way forward seems to be to do a factory reset but I need a PIN number to do this.  I can't remember ever having used this and have no idea what it might be. 

Is there a default PIN I can use?  I don't want to get locked out.  Why do they make things so complicated?