Christmas: time to visit the family in t ... / 2008-12-26

Christmas: time to visit the family in the south of the Netherlands, and a chance to scan the local tv-spectrum for valid DVB-T signals. German transmitters at 514 MHz: ZDF, 706 MHz: ARD and 602 MHz: ARD regional stations. Germany also seems to have a commercial DVB-T provider at 722 MHz offering several channels with some form of encryption. At 834 MHz I found the rtbf service from Walloon Belgium. It is nice to see how foreign DVB-T transmitters offer local channels.

In hopping between w_scan, scan and tzap to feed dvbsnoop data I found that w_scan leaves 'AUTO' in the channel list and in the generated channels.conf when not updated from the network information table. But, tzap can't parse 'AUTO' entries in channels.conf.

Looking at the network information tables with dvbsnoop shows interesting differences between countries. The Netherlands (Digitenne) shows alternate frequencies, Germany shows alternate frequencies with gps locations of transmitters (for mobile applications?) and Belgium admits you found rtbf.