Teletext gone from UK stations on NTL Dublin

byrnefm

Hi,

I was flicking around the channels last night and noticed that BBC1, BBC2, UTV and Channel 4's teletext is missing - have NTL disabled it somehow or are the UK stations no longer transmitting teletext on analog?

Pighead

This has happened to Pighead as well on occasion. I reckon its an NTL fault though. It happens about once a week and then all is normal again. Do you just get a black screen with maybe a bit of gibberish on the top of the creen

kkennedy

This happens on Chorus Analogue aswell. It appears they are broadcasting BBC/UTV/CH4 from a SkyDigibox as the red button is appearing and it is in 4:3 Pan Scan as opposed to the 14:9 from the analogue transmissions.
K

Mossy Monk

moved

bazzer

I reckon it's a technical issue. If the collected analogue signals are prone to the seasonal Co-Channel Interference caused by current weather conditions, then NTL source the channels from satellite, hence no regular teletext.

Alun

It varies a bit with me as well. Sometimes it just goes on BBC2, but is there on BBC1, sometimes it goes altogether.

zilog_jones

bazzer wrote:

I reckon it's a technical issue. If the collected analogue signals are prone to the seasonal Co-Channel Interference caused by current weather conditions, then NTL source the channels from satellite, hence no regular teletext.

Oh, so there's an actual possible reason to this? Same thing happens to me with Chorus analogue cable (Limerick) as what kkennedy said.

Also, how would they normally receive analogue signals for said channels? I know it's possible in Dublin with just a large/high aerial, but Limerick? Do they use some sort of microwave link from somewhere nearer the north?

L1011

Chorus pull them off-air with an impressive array in Cavan, encode, compress and microwave them down to the local headends, dunno what NTL do. In case of faults on Chorus, they revert to using Sky boxes :rolleyes:

When Channel 4 carried just FourText and not Teletext on satellite they gave us that in Maynooth for nearly a year.

bazzer

I remember from working in Cablelink, that they had an installation at or near Clermont Carn. This was to transpose the collected signals from Divis and transfer them via microwave link to Dublin. Before then, you could be pretty much guaranteed CCI for several weeks during summer as the signals were then collected from an aerial at St. Columba's College, near Rathfarnham I believe.

For a time during the early 1990s, Cablelink sometimes used their MMDS feed from the Naul in North County Dublin (which had its own independently received Divis signals) to service the cable system. One could recognise it straightaway as the picture sometimes encrypted for a second or two into the Cryptovision scrambling system. This happened if the syncs were disturbed, such as when BBC Northern Ireland switched to the network feed from London. If the Divis channels on MMDS suffered from severe CCI, the encryption was turned off altogether to allow the channels transmit in the clear. Excessive CCI had the potential to upset the encoders!

CCI appearing on the four Divis channels on NTL Dublin is now rare, but when it does happen, or for some other technical reason, NTL switch to using the feeds from satellite.

zilog_jones

MYOB wrote:

Chorus pull them off-air with an impressive array in Cavan, encode, compress and microwave them down to the local headends, dunno what NTL do. In case of faults on Chorus, they revert to using Sky boxes :rolleyes:

I wonder what sort of bitrate do they use for the link? It looks crap in Limerick - doesn't really look much better than the satellite signal anyway.

What do they normally do for the satellite channels? I've occasionally seen the Sagem MMDS box OSDs on some channels (Paramount and maybe others). But I remember back in the analogue days there were messages on all the Sky channels once saying "Please insert blue card" (or whichever new card they had at the time).

kwinabeeste

byrnefm wrote:

Hi,

I was flicking around the channels last night and noticed that BBC1, BBC2, UTV and Channel 4's teletext is missing - have NTL disabled it somehow or are the UK stations no longer transmitting teletext on analog?

Yeah that happens the whole time. If you do a quick restart it comes back. Press the help button and then the yellow (i think) for restart.

Don't know why it goes like this or how it gets fixed....but it does!!!