Jacob Christensen

In lieu of a comment on Pia Kjærsgaard’s speech on the Danish People’s Party conference (okay, okay: When you consider the party’s approach to the environment – they are somewhat to the right of George W. Bush – then I have to say that all of Kjærsgaard’s talk about the true Danish nature and the faux camping site set up at the convention is as good a demonstration of DF’s chutzpah as anything¹).

And now for something completely different: My continued experiments with digital terrestial television. As mentioned in a previous post, I placed my order with Boxer on Wednesday and, boy were they fast. I received the decoder – or rather: Notification that I could pick up the decoder – on Friday. So off I went earlier today to pick up the parcel and see how things would work out.

Finding a space for the decoder (which technically speaking is a PVR, in case you are curious) and connecting it to the TV set was the easy bit.

And then the problems began. My old mpeg2-decoder generally picks up the signals without major problems. Occasionally, I have had to adjust the aereal (thanks, Chris! You Brits really have a way with letters…) for reasons not immediately obvious, but the new decoder looked completely dead. Okay, too bad. You have the right to return stuff.

Then accidents happened and so far, my reception problem has been solved. To make a long story short: If I turn the aereal and don’t power it, the signal is good and I can pick up the present five digital channels nicely. Actually, I suspect that the picture on the TV set is better because I now use a HDMI instead of a SCART cable to connect the decoder with the TV set. Recording also works without problems.

On the downside, the teletext on the TV set doesn’t work. I can access teletext via the decoder but for mysterious reasons, it does not hold a cache or memory of pages. Actually, it’s a bit like going back to the first TV set I bought. Twenty-five years of technology gone poof.

The next question is how reception of the new mpeg4 free-to-air and decoded channels will work where I live. Denmark has opted for the big bang transition here, so there is no way of telling before November.

1. A brief illustration of chutzpah: A boy, having just been convicted of murdering his parents, begs the judge for leniency because he is an orphan. [↩]

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