Hi, welcome to our forum.

Can you tell us what model of Humax you have please?

Do you have any other recordings scheduled for overlapping times?

What OS do you have on the laptop? Native windows can open standard zip files in Windows Explorer.

Martin Liddle – 2 hours ago  » 

I don’t believe I said that in this thread.

Apologies. It was Graham.

You don’t need to actually re-tune to Midhurst. Without resetting the box, just scroll down the list of channels on the manual tune screen and see what the signal strength is of each one. Don’t press the Scan button.

What signal strength/quality values are you getting on each of the channels?

Minstrel SE – 3 hours ago  » 

Any thoughts please? Is it likely to be the box, the aerial?…why did it work perfectly for months? I have considered neighbour interference, computers unshielded wall plates but nothing adds up.

We have an HDR Fox T2. We’re located at the southern fringe of Winter Hill reception, and for years we had perfect reception on SD and HD. Around March this year we started losing BBC SD channels, and other SD channels were pixellating frequently. HD was almost unaffected but we did have slight interference on occasions. I had originally assumed it was due to the weather, as we have had it quite dry for some time. But when it was still going on in June I decided to check out our installation. (Incidentally, we have a separate Samsung TV plugged directly into the amp, and this has been unable to pick up any channels at all.)

We have a dual-amp setup, in that a single in line amp is installed in the loft next to an 8-way splitter amp with a gain control. We also have two aerials pointing to different transmitters, so I have an aerial combiner feeding into the amps. The combiner is a high pass/low pass filter, so that one side receives channels 21-40 and the other 40-60(+). I initially turned the gain on the splitter up to max, although it wasn’t far off max before I started. This appeared to make no difference.

I made biggest difference by removing the Winter Hill aerial from the combiner and connecting it directly to the amp. Suddenly we now have 70-75% signal on all MUX’s and 100% quality – no pixellation.

While this is good for me, it doesn’t answer the question why this started happening suddenly earlier this year. There seemed to be a sudden drop in power on some MUX’s, especially the BBC SD ones, causing quality on those MUX’s to fluctuate between 25 and 75%.

I checked my aerial the other day. We have a high gain 52 element aerial exactly like this one, and I noticed last weekend that half of the first element is missing. I don’t know how much of an effect this has on the reception, but maybe an aerial expert could give me a clue.

At the moment it is all working fine on all channels, but I too would like to know if something has changed on Winter Hill.

I called an aerial installer a couple of weeks ago who said they will come out and analyse our installation at no cost. They would only charge if we agreed to go ahead with any work they suggested. Perhaps an aerial installer near you will offer the same service.

I get my signal from Winter Hill, and for the past few months a few SD channels have been breaking up. Sometimes so badly that its unwatchable. The worst affected is BBC1/2/4 SD.

I thought it was because we have had high pressure over us for a while, but it has been going on for a bit now.