Tips for Dealing With Television Interference

Television sets are returned to the store every day by customers who claim that the set is faulty as they have not been able to get a clear picture up on the screen. More often than not these disgruntled customers claim that there is some kind of fault with the tuner because it simply won’t tune into any of the digital channels properly.

But if your television is doing the same, don’t assume at the outset that there is a problem with the set, there are other things you can try before you load up the car and head back to the store.

Analogue to Digital

We were used to problems when we were tuning in our old analogue sets, the pictures would often go out of focus and we would end up with the blizzard effect on our screens, or each character on the screen would have a ghost image following them around. That was frustrating but if you were desperate you could still watch it.

Thankfully the upgrade to digital television got rid of such annoying problems and for the most part, when you switch on your set you are greeted by a crystal clear picture on your screen. But there are times when there will be no image on that screen at all, there is no grey area in between, it is quite simply all or nothing as far as digital TV goes.

You should never just assume that the problem is with the aerial either as there are more things to check before you resort to changing the aerial.

Signal Boosters

A signal booster or signal amplifier sounds like it should solve all of your problems, but things are not always as easy as they seem on paper. You would assume that the stronger the signal that you receive the better your picture would be but that’s not strictly true.

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Using a booster might be effective if you have a loss of signal on a few channels but in many cases it can just end up making the problem worse than it already is.

The majority of issues viewers experience are not actually related to the strength of the signal at all but simple interference. In order to get the best quality picture you need to reduce the level of interference, and only when that has been accomplished should you consider adding a signal booster, otherwise you will just be boosting your existing interference.

A signal booster is a good option if you have more than the one TV in your home running off the same signal. As the signal is shared between the sets there can be some drop off reducing the quality of the image you receive.  Boosting it so that both sets receive a full strength signal makes sense, and this is what they were designed for in the first place.

If your problems are down to interference you should in the first instance check the cable that runs between your wall socket and your set top box, or TV as old and worn cables can result in a loss of signal.

Interference

There are lots of items around your home that could cause interference on your TV - things like computer equipment, modems and wireless routers, power adaptors and cordless telephones can all be culprits. The frequency that they are operating on isn’t important, it is the fact that they are close enough to your TV to have an effect.

Switch all of these items off and see if the problem with the TV is resolved.  If it is then go through the process of switching everything on again one by one until you find the cause of the interference. When you find it move it into another room or another part of the house where it can’t impact on the TV.

     Jess

About the Guest Author:

As a regular blogger Jess has a lot of computer equipment around the house that can cause 4G TV interference. Thankfully with advice from Get Me Digital interference is no longer a problem in her household.