As a general rule, a good signal can be received at approximately 50km away from a broadcasting tower.
If living in a poor reception area (far from the nearest transmitter/ between lots of obstacles) or if you have multiple FTA TV points (the signal is shared between multiple TVs) you may need to add an amplifier to your antenna system or have your antenna installed on a higher mast. These additional pieces of equipment will help achieve an acceptable level of signal and significantly improve your viewing experience.
On the other hand, for those who live too close to transmitter towers, an attenuator may be required to reduce the incoming signal. While a strong signal is often thought of as a plus, a signal that is too high will likely cause pixelation or burn out your TV’s tuner. Typically a good signal strength is between 60-65dBuV. You can check the nearest transmitters and signal strength available from your location using the MySwitch website.
While decibels (dBuV) are used to measure the strength of a signal, CBER and VBER are common measures of signal quality often used by installers. CBER indicates the number of errors present before any correction by your TV has taken place. Ideally, CBER should be lower than 2E-2 (2 errors in every 100 bits of data) for good quality reception.VBER is the bit rate error after your TV has identified and corrected error in the transmission channel, the VBER should be lower than 2E-4 (2 errors in every 10,000 bits of data).
Modulation Error Ratio (MER) is another widely used measure of signal quality, which takes into account the sum of all interference effects occurring on the transmission channel. For good TV reception, the preferred MER is at least 25 dB.
When it comes to evaluating whether a signal is ‘good’ or ‘bad, the quality of the signal is more important than the strength of a signal. While strength can be easily corrected using equipment such as an amplifier or attenuator, a poor quality signal cannot be as easily fixed.
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