Now that we have more free time on vacation or at least we go to bed later to take advantage of the greater number of daylight hours, we may consume more DTT to watch programs like the Grand Prix. However, you may have also noticed a loss of quality, interference and even the cessation of the broadcast. Don’t worry, everything has a meteorological explanation.
We are going to review the phenomenon known as the fading effect and why the highest summer temperatures become the worst enemy of DTT.
Worse DTT quality in summer
Summer, due to high temperatures, can have an impact on a series of systems. For example, we may find interference or a loss of quality in Digital Terrestrial Television.
According to Guillermo Canal, manager of Feceminte (Federació Catalana d’Empreses de Telecomunicacions), the degradation of the television signal or fading effect, is a common phenomenon that is produced by the interference of television waves from various broadcasting centers. This effect is accentuated in summer, with the high temperatures and the proximity to the sea, and causes many towns to suffer reception problems for DTT channels.
The scientific reason for this is because high temperatures cause greater evaporation and condensation of seawater. The water particles evaporated in the air modify the propagation conditions of the DTT signal, causing irregular variations in the signal levels. The effect on these is an increase in the propagation level of the signal, since it reaches further, which means that signals from the same channel can be received from different repeaters, causing interference between them.
The good news is that at night the signal stabilizes, since the temperatures drop, the signal does not reach as far and does not generate as much interference. This is not something new since there is DTT. When it was broadcast in analog form, the heat and reflection of the sea weakened the received signal and the image or sound could be of poor quality. The problem is that with DTT, a weak signal implies the total loss of image and sound, since digital television requires minimum signal quality conditions for its operation.
Problems from Algeria and Morocco
Depending on the area, if you are in Andalusia you may have added problems. According to the technical secretary of the Andalusian Telecommunications Association, José Manuel Muñiz, “in recent weeks there have been many complaints from users of DTT services for the loss of content for more or less part of the day in the coastal provinces , and especially in those of Cádiz and Málaga, depending on the area, affecting a number of different channels».
These complaints have come to focus their origin on the work that is currently being carried out due to the application of the second digital dividend, although that is not the reason or origin of the problem. The origin of the problem is already an old acquaintance, which by these dates has been repeated year after year. And the origin, apart from the technical explanations that favor this phenomenon in summer, which we have commented on previously, “is none other than the interference caused by signals from North African countries, and specifically from the Kingdom of from Morocco and Algeria.
