Fitzherbert CH33 570MHz no longer transmitting?

i’ve been enjoying Freeview on UHF for about 3 years now.

Across the harbour in Wellington I have line of sight to Fitzherbert, Lower Hutt, which shows as 98% signal strength and around 65% quality at my TV.

That was... until yesterday.

CH33 570MHZ just dropped off. No TV3, 3+1, Bravo, in fact all the Fairfax body of channels.

Yet CH35 and 37 are still good. TV-ONE, Two, Prime, Duke etc.

Did I miss the memo? Is anyone else experiencing the same problem, or is the fault my end?

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Permalink Reply by willis on December 5, 2018 at 13:22

probably struck by lightning

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Permalink Reply by Mark on December 5, 2018 at 16:09

We noticed on Monday night that we had no TV reception from Mt Fitzherbert (we're in central Wellington). I used the Freeview website "Contact Us" form and got this reply today:

Were very sorry to hear you have been experiencing problems,

We can confirm that there was an issue at Fitzherbert and this has been resolved, you should no longer be having any problems with the service.

But still don't seem to have any signal... Has yours started working again?

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Weir on December 5, 2018 at 17:16

Just re-tuned the TV.

Still nothing on CH33 570 MHz.

All other channels tracking 98% strength, 60% quality.

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Permalink Reply by Warwick Terry on December 5, 2018 at 19:00

Same problem here. In Brooklyn, aerial pointed at Fitzherbert, problem started 2 days ago, retuned several times including just now, no improvement.

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Permalink Reply by Andrew Weir on December 5, 2018 at 19:30

Just over the next hill Warwick, in Highbury.

Do let us know if anything changes.

Otherwise it’s back to cable, Netflix, on-demand... (yeah, a real1st world problem we have)

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Permalink Reply by Warwick Terry on December 7, 2018 at 19:42

Hi Andrew, got message back from FreeviewNZ:

Kordia informed us on Monday that the storm did damage their Fitzherbert transmitter and it was fixed Monday afternoon. If your channels aren’t back yet, try a cold retune if you haven’t already - power off at the wall, reconnect the aerial cable, power on then go to the Tuning menu to re-tune the channels. This gives the TV a reboot and often corrects the problem.

Did cold re-tune as above, problem remained. Tried again, this time doing a factory reset and unplugging everything for several hours before reconnecting everything and re-tuning — it worked! All channels back, signal quality 100%. Worth a try!

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Permalink Reply by Mark on December 7, 2018 at 20:21

I received this email from Freeview at lunchtime today:

We have heard back from our contacts at Kordia, their technicians are investigating their Fitzherbert transmitter. They believe it may have been damaged in the storm last weekend and while the major issue was addressed on Monday, they'll send a technician to climb the transmitter as soon as weather permits to carry out a closer inspection and address this.

Things were still broken this morning, but working when I checked now (no retune needed), so the tech obviously was able to repair something this afternoon.
I do think that the Freeview service status page could use a few more updates, as I never saw this fault listed. Showing recently repaired faults would also be useful.