Tech Talk: It is D Day and all will be digital. David Behrens explains.

IT WAS in March 1969 that all Yorkshire’s TVs went blank. A combination of strong winds and the weight of the ice that had formed around its mast sent the Emley Moor transmitter on the hills above Huddersfield crashing to the ground. This month, it all goes dark once more, but it is the wind of change, rather than a severe nor’westerly, that is doing the damage.

The mast itself – the tallest in Europe – will remain upright but the transmitter will switch after 55 years from analogue to digital-only signals. That means that if you haven’t already done so, you have four days to buy a digital set-top box before channels start to drop off your TV. BBC2 will be the first to disappear, this Wednesday. The other channels will follow two weeks later.

For some viewers, D Day (that’s D for digital) has already happened; the small Sheffield, Chesterfield, Scarborough and Lincolnshire masts lost their analogue signals during August. But it’s Emley Moor and its string of relay transmitters across Yorkshire that will have the biggest impact.

To watch digital, you will need a set-top box for every TV in your house that doesn’t have Freeview built in. But recording programmes opens up a whole new can of worms. Your DVD recorder will no longer work as it did unless it too has Freeview built in – and a great many fairly recent models do not.

So, if you want to continue taping Top Gear, here are your options...

Connect your recorder to the second Scart socket on the back of a Freeview box. You can set the timer as usual but you must leave the box tuned to the channel you want to record. It’s a no-cost solution, but not very practical.

Buy a cheap Freeview box just for your video recorder. You’ll need to set two timers for each recording – one on the Freeview box and one on the recorder.

Invest in a new digital recorder – the cheapest is under £100. If you haven’t owned one before, they’re a revelation; you pick programmes to record from an on-screen guide. The box takes care of the start and stop times automatically and can record an entire series with one click of the remote. There’s no drop in picture quality, either. Lots of models are available, the main difference being the size of the hard disk, which controls the number of programmes you can keep at once. Just make sure the box has a Free-view Plus logo.