Why has my Freeview signal disappeared? Complete UK troubleshooting guide

The most common causes of sudden Freeview signal loss in the UK, in order of frequency: a retune is needed, weather (rain fade, high wind), a loose or weathered F-connector at the aerial, transmitter engineering work (check Freeview’s channel checker first), 4G/5G mobile interference at 700-800 MHz (Restore TV provides free filters), or aerial damage. Most cases are fixed without an engineer call-out.

Quick triage: the 60-second decision tree

Before anything else, work down this list in order. Most Freeview faults are resolved in step 1 or 2.

Is it one channel, a block of channels, or everything? A single missing channel almost always means a retune. A block of channels missing (e.g. all of BBC One, Two, News on the same MUX — a “multiplex” is a bundle of channels broadcast on one frequency) points to a transmitter problem or interference. Total loss points to a cable, aerial, or hardware fault.
Is the weather unusual right now? Heavy rain, gale-force wind, wet snow, or a strange high-pressure heatwave can all degrade reception in different ways. If the picture pixelates during a downpour and recovers afterwards, you’ve found your cause.
Has anyone touched the aerial cable in the last week? A new TV, a moved sofa, a child or pet near the wall plate — a half-seated F-connector (the screw-on coaxial plug) is the single most common DIY-fixable cause.
Check Freeview’s transmitter checker by postcode. It will tell you, right now, whether your local transmitter is in planned engineering. Five minutes saved versus an hour on the roof.
Try a full retune from the TV menu. Not a “channel scan add” — a full reset and rescan. This fixes a surprising number of “lost channel” faults caused by frequency reshuffles.

If steps 1-5 don’t resolve it, the rest of this guide walks through every realistic cause in order of frequency.

The full causes, ranked by frequency

1. A retune is required

UK Freeview transmitters periodically reshuffle which channel sits on which UHF frequency — sometimes for engineering reasons, sometimes because Ofcom has reallocated spectrum. When that happens, your TV is still tuned to the old frequency and the channel appears to have vanished. The fix is a full retune (not an “add channels” scan, which leaves the old entries in place).

How to do a full retune by brand:

Samsung: Menu (or Home) → Settings → Broadcasting → Auto Tuning → Start. On 2023+ Tizen sets it’s Settings → All Settings → Broadcasting → Auto Tuning.
LG: Settings (gear icon) → All Settings → Channels → Channel Tuning → Auto Tuning. Choose “Antenna” not “Cable”.
Sony: Home → Settings → Channel Setup → Digital Setup → Digital Auto Tuning. On Google TV Bravia, it’s Settings → Channels & Inputs → Channels → Auto Tuning.
Panasonic: Menu → Setup → Tuning Menu → Auto Setup → DVB-T Auto Setup. Confirm “Yes” to wipe existing channels first.
Hisense / VIDAA: Home → Settings → Channel → Auto Scan → Antenna.
TCL: Settings → Channels → Channel Scan → DVB-T. On Roku TV models it’s Settings → TV inputs → Antenna TV → Set up input.

A full retune typically takes three to ten minutes. If it finds fewer channels than before, that’s a signal-strength fault, not a tuning fault — move to the next section.

2. Weather: rain fade, wind, snow, and atmospheric ducting

UHF digital TV (the 470-694 MHz band that Freeview uses) is more weather-tolerant than satellite but not immune. The symptoms differ:

Rain fade is gradual — pixelation that worsens as the rain intensifies and recovers within minutes of it stopping. It hits weakest-signal channels first. If you only see it on the COM7 MUX or HD channels, your margin was already thin.
High wind moves the aerial. A Yagi (the fishbone-shaped horizontal aerial on most UK roofs) only needs to swing two or three degrees off-beam to lose lock on a distant transmitter. Pixelation that’s worst in gusts and clears in calm air is wind-induced — usually a sign the aerial mount or lashing is loose.
Wet snow sticking to the aerial elements adds mass and detunes the array. Dry snow rarely causes problems; wet snow does.
Atmospheric ducting is the counter-intuitive one. On hot, still, high-pressure days a temperature inversion can carry distant transmitters into your area on the same frequency as your local one, causing co-channel interference. You’ll see pixelation in clear, sunny weather — exactly when you’d least expect it. It usually clears overnight as the inversion breaks. Ofcom and the RTIS service track high-pressure events.

If weather is the only trigger and the rest of the time reception is fine, the aerial is marginal. The fix is rarely a bigger aerial — it’s a better-aimed one, or sometimes a lower-gain aerial pointed more precisely.

3. Cable and connector faults

The single most under-diagnosed cause. Look at the F-connector (the screw-on plug) where the cable leaves the aerial. If it’s not weatherproofed with self-amalgamating tape, water gets into the braid via capillary action, corrodes the copper, and the signal drops over months or years until one wet morning it vanishes.

A few specifics worth knowing:

RG6 vs CT100/WF100: RG6 is the budget US-spec coax often used in cheap UK installs. CT100 (and its successor WF100) is the UK satellite/terrestrial standard — foam-filled dielectric, copper-plated steel inner, foil-and-braid screen. CT100 holds up far better in damp British lofts and external runs. If your aerial cable is the thin, shiny, black “shotgun” type from a 2003 Argos kit, replacing the run is usually a bigger improvement than upgrading the aerial.
Where damage typically occurs: at the aerial connector (UV and water), at the wall-plate end (people yanking on the lead), and at any external run that loops under a soffit where birds can perch and peck.
The diagnostic trick: wiggle the cable at each end while watching the signal-strength meter in the TV’s tuning menu. A sudden drop on movement is a connector fault. A gradual drop is corrosion.

4. Splitters and amplifiers — and why amplifiers can make things worse

This is the most counter-intuitive part of Freeview troubleshooting. If your signal is weak, more amplification is rarely the answer.

A masthead amplifier (powered, mounted at the aerial) raises both signal and noise. If the aerial itself is delivering a clean signal at, say, 50 dBuV, amplifying it to 70 dBuV gives the tuner a comfortable level. But if the aerial is delivering 30 dBuV swimming in noise from a nearby 4G mast or a faulty LED driver, amplifying that just gives you louder noise. Worse, an over-driven amp can overload the tuner front-end, especially if you live near a high-power transmitter like Crystal Palace, Sutton Coldfield, or Winter Hill. Symptom: pixelation that’s worst on the strongest channels, not the weakest. The fix is to remove the amplifier or fit an attenuator, not to add gain.

Distribution amplifiers in lofts (the boxes with four or eight outputs and a power supply) also fail. The classic symptom: all rooms lose signal at once and the LED on the amp is off or flickering. Power supplies on these units are usually the failure point — they’re cheap, and a replacement PSU costs less than a call-out.

Passive splitters lose roughly 3.5 dB per output. A four-way splitter on a marginal aerial can be the final straw.

5. 4G and 5G mobile interference (the 700/800 MHz issue)

In 2013, Ofcom reallocated the 800 MHz band (previously used by analogue TV channels 61-69) to 4G mobile. In 2020, the 700 MHz band (channels 49-60) was reallocated to 5G mobile. Both sit immediately adjacent to — and historically inside — the Freeview band.

The result: a 4G or 5G mast within a few hundred metres of your aerial can swamp the tuner with out-of-band signal that the aerial wasn’t designed to reject. Symptoms are very specific: pixelation that started around the time a new mast went up, often worst at peak mobile usage hours (5-9pm), and frequently affecting only the highest-frequency Freeview MUXes.

Restore TV (the body that replaced Digital UK’s at800/at700 schemes) provides free filters to households affected by confirmed mobile-interference. Eligibility is based on geographic proximity to the offending mast and a confirmed symptom pattern. Call their helpline before buying a filter on Amazon — the wrong filter (e.g. an 800 MHz filter when the problem is 700 MHz) won’t help.

If you live in a strong-signal area near a Group A or Group K aerial (a “Group” refers to the band of UHF frequencies the aerial is optimised for), a wideband aerial may actually be your problem, not your solution. Widebands accept the mobile bands; grouped aerials reject them.

6. Aerial damage

Walk to a point where you can see the aerial from the ground, ideally with binoculars. Look for:

Bent or missing elements (the horizontal cross-rods on a Yagi). One missing director element rarely matters; a missing reflector — the long bar at the rear — kills the aerial’s gain almost completely.
The aerial pointing the wrong way. Compare it to neighbours. If yours has rotated 30 degrees in a recent storm, that’s your fault.
A drooping cable with a sharp kink near the mast clamp. Coax doesn’t tolerate kinks — the impedance changes at the kink and signal reflects back.
Bird damage to the balun (the small grey or black box where the cable meets the aerial). Magpies are particular offenders.

A bent element can often be straightened. A snapped boom or a corroded balun means the aerial is end-of-life. See our TV aerial repair page for what’s economic to repair versus replace.

7. Transmitter engineering work

Before you do anything on a ladder, check whether the problem is at the transmitter end. The major UK transmitters — Crystal Palace, Sutton Coldfield, Winter Hill, Emley Moor, and the rest of the 50 main transmitters — undertake routine maintenance that can take individual MUXes off-air for hours.

Freeview’s channel checker — postcode-based, tells you which transmitter you’re served by and whether it’s currently in work.
The RTIS / radioandtvhelp.co.uk site cross-references engineering with atmospheric conditions.
BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 use the same transmitter infrastructure (operated by Arqiva), so all the major broadcasters go off together when a MUX is down.

If the checker shows engineering in progress, the answer is “wait”. No retune, no roof trip, no engineer.

When to call an engineer

Some signs that DIY won’t fix it:

The aerial is on a chimney, gable-end, or roof you cannot reach safely from a ladder. We don’t recommend any homeowner attempt roof-edge work — it’s the single biggest cause of fatal home-DIY accidents in the UK.
You’ve completed the triage steps, retuned, and confirmed no transmitter engineering, and the problem persists across multiple TVs.
The signal-strength meter in the TV menu shows zero or near-zero on all MUXes with the cable directly plugged in (no amplifier, no splitter).
You suspect a buried/concealed cable run is damaged.
The aerial is visibly off-beam, drooping, or missing elements.

When choosing an installer, look for CAI (Confederation of Aerial Industries) membership — it’s the trade body that sets installation and safety standards in the UK. Membership is verifiable on the CAI’s own register; ask for the member number.

See our TV aerial repair and TV aerial installation pages for what’s involved.

FAQ

Why has my Freeview gone?

In nine cases out of ten: either a retune is needed (the channel moved frequency), the weather is degrading a marginal signal, a connector has corroded, or your local transmitter is in engineering. Work down the triage list above before assuming the aerial itself is faulty.

Freeview no signal but aerial is connected — what now?

Check the connector at both ends. Unscrew, inspect the inner copper for green corrosion, re-seat firmly. Then check the TV’s signal-strength meter (in the manual tuning menu) with the cable straight to the TV — no splitters, no amplifier. Zero signal on every MUX with a direct connection means the fault is upstream (cable, aerial, or transmitter). Some signal on some MUXes points to interference or alignment.

Why has my Freeview disappeared on one TV but not another?

That’s almost always a cable, splitter, or amplifier fault between the splitter and the affected TV — not an aerial fault. Swap the leads at the splitter to confirm: if the fault follows the lead, replace the lead; if it stays on the same TV’s port, the splitter output is dead.

Will heavy rain cause Freeview to lose signal?

Yes, but only if your signal margin is already low. A well-aligned aerial in a normal signal area should ride through rain without pixelation. Persistent rain-fade means the aerial, cable, or alignment is marginal — fix the root cause rather than tolerating it.

Has the 4G/5G rollout broken my Freeview?

Possibly, if a new mast went up near you and the problem started shortly after. The 700 MHz band was reallocated to mobile in 2020 and sits immediately adjacent to Freeview’s upper channels. Restore TV provides free filters where interference is confirmed — contact them before buying anything.

How often should a TV aerial be replaced?

A correctly installed external Yagi with CT100/WF100 cable and a weatherproofed connector should give 15-20 years of service. Lofts can be longer because there’s no weather exposure. Sudden failure after that age is usually the balun or the connector, not the elements — and is often economic to repair rather than replace.

Do I need to retune Freeview regularly?

No regular schedule, but a retune is sensible whenever Freeview announces a frequency change (rare, usually pre-announced on screen for a fortnight) or after you’ve lost a channel block. The Freeview site publishes a national change calendar.

Still stuck? If you’ve worked through this guide and the fault persists, the next step is a signal-strength survey at the wall plate and at the aerial. Our TV aerial repair service covers diagnostic visits for exactly these “I’ve tried everything” cases. We don’t quote a fix until we’ve measured the actual fault.