ABC-TV Sydney streams suddenly not decoded Options

[stevebow]

Hi,

Sometime within the last few days the ABC-TV Sydney streams are very garbled/broken up. The Status is locked, Strength is 55% (it always has been) but Quality (usually 100%) is jumping around 6-8% range.

All the other networks are fine, it's just the ABC.

My previous posts also concern the ABC, albeit with different problems, and I seem to see an emerging pattern here...

Is there anyone in Sydeny who could confirm this please?

I can post TSReader results if that would help.

[stevebow]

Hmmm, ABC-TV has just come good, Quality hovering around 70-80% though...

BTW, what does "Quality" indicate exactly?

[nate]

The quality value is BDA driver dependent. Some drivers report in the range 0-100 with 100 being best. Some report values around 200-300 with lower being better. It was an oversight on behalf of the guys who created the BDA spec.

Just to check, your other channels are still behaving normally are they? If so, that would mean it's probably not a problem that's developed with your antenna or cabling.

[stevebow]

Just to check, your other channels are still behaving normally are they? If so, that would mean it's probably not a problem that's developed with your antenna or cabling.

Thanks for the reply. All other channels are fine.

Having said that, it appears to be a problem with the connector on the RF cable plugged into the tuner card. I have changed that and so far quality for ABC is back to 100%.

Now, why the other channels were still working is a mystery. The only clue perhaps is the Strength indicator, 55% for ABC which was the lowest for all networks received (70% for Seven, 90% for Nine, 70% for Ten, 85% for SBS, 75% for D44). The ABC is now at 60% with the new connector. I'll see how that goes.

Having asked about Quality, what does "strength" mean? Is it something that can be translated into something more tangile, such a dBm or uV?

[nate]

You can get three tuning statistics from a BDA driver. Strength, Quality, and Locked. You can't rely on any of them to give you a consistent value from one driver to the next. Even something as simple as Locked which is either true or false is not always set correctly. From a programming point of view all we can do is display the raw information the driver returns, then it's up to the user to get to know what "normal" values are for their particular driver.