Why has my TV lost channels?

It’s one of the most common calls we get: BBC One is fine, but half the ITV and Channel 4 channels have vanished, or a whole group of channels freezes every evening. The cause tends to be one of five things, and a couple of them you can fix in minutes.

Channels travel in groups

Freeview channels are broadcast in bundles called multiplexes, each on its own frequency. If one bundle arrives too weak, every channel in it suffers at once while the others carry on as normal. So when channels disappear in a group, it points to signal rather than to your TV.

Five common causes

• A retune that picked the wrong transmitter. In much of Surrey and Kent a TV can see more than one transmitter. If it locks onto a weaker, more distant one, some channels drop out.
• Water in the cable. Rain getting into a joint on the outside wall slowly ruins the signal, and the weakest multiplexes go first.
• An aerial knocked off line. A gusty night can turn an aerial slightly, and channels on the margin vanish.
• Something new in the way. New buildings and trees coming into leaf can block or scatter the signal.
• Phone mast interference. Signals from 4G and 5G phone masts can overload an aerial system, especially one with an old amplifier.

  Try this first. Run a full first-time installation retune on the TV, not a quick update. Then note which channels are still missing. If they all share a multiplex, that’s useful for our engineer to know.

When to call an engineer

If a full retune doesn’t bring the channels back, or they drop in and out as the weather changes, the fault is outside the TV. An engineer will take readings from the roof down to the socket to see where the signal goes missing, and repair that link.

Our TV aerial repair page has a fault checker you can use first, and you can send us the symptoms on WhatsApp.