Now in summer we all tend to have more free time and with the heat there are certain times of the day that it is better to stay at home under the air conditioning or fan on duty. Many people take advantage of these hours to watch television, but it may happen that they begin to see DTT badly. It’s not a problem with your television, it’s about the heat, which doesn’t get along too well with DTT. We tell you why it can be seen much worse during the summer.
As we say, this problem does not occur throughout the Spanish geography, but rather it is a problem that mainly affects the coastal areas. In these, every summer there is usually a general worsening of the signal and this is due, as we will see later, to the high temperatures that are registered in the summer months.
The fading effect, the main culprit
As we said a little above, the heat is the main culprit for the worsening of the DTT signal in coastal areas. This is because “his fault” produces an effect known as fading , which translated from English means fading. This effect means that the signal does not reach homes in these areas well, directly causing a fairly significant pixelation in the signal.
Heat is the number 1 problem in summer for DTT, but it’s not really the direct culprit. The fading effect occurs because high temperatures cause greater evaporation and condensation of seawater . These evaporated seawater particles modify how radiofrequency waves propagate in the air, thereby causing irregular variations in DTT signal levels.
In this way, the signal, by having these variations at the propagation level, reaches “further”, which causes the signals of the same channel to be received from different repeaters. This will lead to much more interference caused by these signal crossings, thus degenerating the quality of the signal that reaches each home . As we have said before, the fading effect mainly affects coastal areas and areas that are closer to the sea. The areas that suffer this fading effect more intensely are those where the DTT signal reaches above the sea , since this effect is much worse there.
In addition to this fading effect, heat can also affect the quality of the signal in other ways, since the increase in ground temperature does not sit too well with the DTT signal either. However, this heat factor cannot be compared to the evaporation of salt water, the main culprit in this worsening. The decrease in heat that occurs at night increases the quality of the signal , not only in terms of image, but also in terms of sound.
Does the fading effect have a solution?
It is up to us to improve the DTT signal in some cases, but the truth is that with the fading effect we are going to have it more complicated. DTT requires that the signal have a minimum quality so that it can be received correctly and the interference caused by this effect means that this is not possible most of the time.
A solution that can be effective in some cases is to reorient our antenna so that it points to another repeater (if possible, facing away from the sea), since if we do this, we may get rid of the fading effect to a great extent. It is also recommended that our antenna be of good quality, since these are usually less likely to suffer from this effect.