Interesting, I'm also on the east coast, I get battered by dutch radio amongst others, I need an 8dB snrm during the day to survive through the night. Although I have a longish line, 45dB, 3.38KM actual line length.

I'm on a relatively short line with attenuation of 23db, maybe it's Dutch radio and not German, I can't speak either.

How much the Dutch radio stations will affect you all at night probably has a lot to do with length of line, and how much of it (if any) is strung horizontally from telephone poles.
If a line is totally underground, I'd expect the only part of the line (to be affected) would be that which is inside the house.
A long rural (or pre-1970s) line, which has large lengths stung from poles will be more affected.

My line is all underground and it's pre-1970s.

The only overhead length on mine is from the house to the pole over the road, the rest is u/g to the exchange. But probably enough exposed to have a significant effect. I live in quite an elevated position too, excellent radio and tv signals here.

In reply to a post by Banger:

My line is all underground and it's pre-1970s.

You're one of the lucky ones (as were my parents at their old house - estate built between 1967 & 1970, all underground).
Unfortunately, underground lines were all too rare back then.
Also, BT (or the GPO, or Post Office Telecommunications as they were called back then) didn't use cable ducts. You'll find your cable, and the joint are simply buried under a pile of dirt (meaning the road/pathway has to be dug up to fix faults or drain water from the cable joins) .

I don't know where you get your info. from but our estate was built in the 1960s, and it is all ducted. Even the run down our drive is terminated and underground. All the ducts have access points every few metres as I once had a fault and watched the BT Engineer change cabinet pairs in one of these access points. Also inside the access point the terminations were encapsulated in a plastic pod which the Engineer unscrewed to re-terminate my line. I suspect the plastic pod was an upgrade at some point, maybe a BT Engineer can comment?

In reply to a post by Banger:

I don't know where you get your info. from but our estate was built in the 1960s, and it is all ducted.

From the fact BT had to dig a large hole outside my parent's old house to get to the cable joints (no access covers, no boxes, just joints buried under the path).

In reply to a post by jeff1106uk:

My SNR is now dropping 6db when it gets dark, used to be about 3db but seems to be getting worse.

Your margin drops because the sun sets, no other reason.

So it seems, BUT, last time Enta got BT to look at it they did something and when it was reset to 6db it only dropped 3db, 3 months later after the last lot of disconnects which were caused by BT messing about up my telephone pole, and Enta having them do deep diagnostics it jumped to 12 then 15 and that's when the nightly drop increased to 6db.

The target margin was reduced to 12db after 16 days solid connection, still getting a 6db drop. I'm now waiting for the next drop to 9db which hopefully should be at the end of next week.

I'm also still not connected to a business connection, upload sync is still showing at 448, I raised a support ticket with WebTapestry on Wednesday morning after the migration and have phoned them twice, still haven't got an answer as to why or when it will be sorted

Edited by jeff1106uk (Fri 27-Mar-09 14:30:42)