Dear LPG,

Have you noticed how often you turn on the television to find a message instructing you to reset your channels because they have altered?  It used to happen quite often over the past couple of years but is less frequent these days, and while bigger televisions appear to be able to do it automatically, the little ones that we are more likely to have in our bedrooms used to greet you with a message instructing you to recalibrate the channels.

 I like to help where I can and found myself being asked to sort out one of my neighbours’ television problems recently.  I have to say that the problem left me a bit out of my depth.   She told me that her favourite television station had disappeared and, in spite of all the fiddling that she had done with the remote control, she just could not find it.   We spent a lot of time fiddling with the Arial to no avail and, in the end I found the TV station’s telephone number online and gave them a call only to be told that they no longer broadcast an SD service.  In fact, they had gone exclusively HD.    

I always thought that HD (High Definition) just meant that the picture quality was better for your eyes when you watched, but the advisor told me that the way the televisions broadcast is slightly different too.  Many of the bigger television companies offer both options, which is why you will find the companies like BBC and ITV offering their channels with HD options while the smaller companies have to make a choice.

It felt like the end of the road for my neighbour and her favourite channel unless she was prepared to buy a new television but there is a solution.  Do you remember back in October 2012 when we all had to deal with the UK Digital TV Switchover and there was the option of getting a Digital set top box? Well you can now get HD set top boxes which can fix this problem.  We bought one in Argos but there are quite a few available, and a bit of messing around with the wires has reunited my neighbour with her favourite television channel.  We spent about £35.00 but there are quite a variety of these boxes at quite a variety of prices on the market.

There is only one thing left to say…  now she has her favourite channel back but neither of us can see any difference in picture quality… perhaps we have just got old eyes…

TN, Sydenham

There are many different kinds of HD set top boxes and many different ways to connect them.  It can be quite a complicated process which you may need some help with but, TN has a few bits of information to share on the subject…

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