Iffy YouView Box from TalkTalk

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A Huawei one at a customer's house.

It has probably been there for about three years and has been losing terrestrial channels on and off in the past two weeks.

Having checked the outside downlead, masthead amp and loft psu to confirm signal stability and then connecting the wallplate cable straight onto the TV (and Panasonic DVR) all channels come in from Guildford though one mux is slightly lower than the others in level.

So a call to TalkTalk taking almost 40 minutes and with the request of a replacement box - if they offer it - by post, the client is told that he will need to have a visit from 'BrightSpark' in order to assess the issue.

Before putting tools away and closing the loft, they ask the client about all tests done to find the Huawei box on the blink, they confirm they knew of issues via self report diagnostics on the ethernet link.

So, who are these BrightSpark engineers, why do they need to go out, apart from hand delivering a £20 settop box, and why did they not bother calling client when the box first sent out warnings of tuner failure ?

2 hours and fuel wasted, I could have been down the pub.
 

sonic1

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Personally I would not trust anyone who worked for a company called" BrightSparks " the name alone rings alarm bells and to be honest its almost insulting to the poor sods that have to work under the banner :wacko:
 

Channel Hopper

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An 'update'.

The engineer from Bright Sparks came this afternoon. He quickly established that the strength of the signal was 29 and said that the YouView box will not work at all on less than about 35 and will only partly work on less than 45. I wonder whether the strength of the signal has declined as a result of the removal of the amplifier.

The engineer was adamant that the tuner in the box was robust and most unlikely to be the cause of the problem. When I said that the signal that was coming through the recorder worked fine, he replied that the YouView box requires twice the signal that a VCR requires. We would like to get the YouView box going again.

So, are these boxes manufactured with a 'deaf' tuner? The Panasonic hard drive recorder - DMR 7 series I think ?) that sits above it works seemingly without trouble. Additionally this was giving a final level on each channel between 5 and 10 on the quality - right hand side of the menu - when retuned.
 
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