Survey - TV interference caused by phone masts

Since the summer, people have been contacting the Focus Team about problems with their Freeview TV signal following the installation of new 4G phone masts in the place of old 3G ones.

There is a service, at800, that was set up to help with these problems. However, they won't help if you have access to an alternative service on one TV - such as Sky or Virgin Media - even if you have other TVs in the house that can only use Freeview. We've also heard of a number of cases where the filters they've supplied have not been enough to fix the problem and people have ended up having to take time off work to wait in for engineers to visit.

We're trying to gather evidence of the extent of the problem and have created a short survey. If you've been affected, please fill it in here.

Freeview TV reception - update

Many thanks to our reader who sent in a link to the Digital UK Planned Engineering Works web page.

It's rather technical - it talks about "DTT Muxes", which isn't very user-friendly. However it shows that during May 2009 services from the Mendip transmitter will be affected as follows:

Digital TV - all channels - weak reception and short service breaks
Analogue TV - BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 - weak reception and short service breaks
Radio - Kiss 101 FM - short service breaks

Problems with Freeview TV reception?

Is anyone in the BS37 area having problems with certain channels becoming very weak or disappearing altogether? This is Freeview, rather than satellite or cable.

For some time our picture on BBC4, and sometimes other channels, has started to break up with flashing bars, or the TV has shown a message "weak signal" or "channel not tuned". Sometimes one make of equipment can view a channel, but another make can't.

If you've been having problems like this please leave a comment with a note of the channels involved and your postcode.