Rowridge Retuning Event 18 April 2012

For those of you who receive your Freeview digital tv signals from the Rowridge transmitter on the Isle of Wight, this is a reminder that you will have to retune all your Freeview receivers again this coming Wednesday, 18 April. If you receive signals from a relay transmitter, like Winterborne Stickland, you do not have to carry out another retune this Wednesday.

This Rowridge retune is necessary because the three COM Muxes will be changing channels and be transmitted from the new mast at a higher power with effect from Wednesday. Stations like 5*, 5 USA, ITV-3, Pick TV, Dave, Sky News, Film 4 and ITV-4 plus the commercial radio stations will be affected. That change has not been possible until now because of potential interference with the Crystal Palace transmissions in some areas. On the 18 April, Crystal Palace is going through its final Switchover stage and the possibility of such interference will thereafter be removed.

The horizontally polarised transmissions of these three channels from Rowridge, like those at present, will increase their power by 2.5 times, going from the current 20kW to 50kW. New vertically polarised transmissions will start at the same time, but at a power of 200kW, ten times the current level.

If you have difficulty now in receiving the above stations, you should find an improvement after Wednesday's retune. If difficulties still persist and you particularly want to receive such stations, having your aerial changed to a vertically polarised position should solve the problem.

This final retune in the current series, if carried out using the automatic tuning function of your receivers, should make no difference to all the other channels which are not changing at all. If, however, you do find that BBC and ITV/C4/C5 stations become unstable and start to pixillate and freeze, then use your menu features to find out on what channel they are being received.

BBC stations (not HD) should be on channel 24. If you're experiencing pixillation you may find they are coming in on channel 23 (the Crystal Palace channel). Similarly with the ITV/C4/C5 stations: they should be on channel 27 but if they're pixellating you may find they are on channel 26 (the Crystal Palace channel). The remedy is to use the manual tune option in the menu. Select any BBC station, choose "manual tune", select channel 24 and save. Repeat by selecting ITV-1, choose "manual tune", select channel 27 and save. It is likely you would need to repeat that after any future retune event. By far the majority of people will not have to do this - quite possibly nobody will, but if you live on very high ground with little obstruction to the east it remains a faint possibility and would depend upon the weather at the time of retuning. Good weather would be most likely to allow long distance reception of Crystal Palace but the forecast for this Wednesday is not that.