The TV Licence: Loopholes and evasion

I have been wondering about a possible loophole in the TV Licensing detection system and am wondering if those in the know could clarify my suspicion.

We all know, there is a way to detect whether a television is in use by searching for a specific oscillating frequency, leaked by the RF decoder… so if you’ve got a telly without a license, your going to get caught.

HOWEVER, what about buying a license for only a black and white television, and using a colour set? Surely this cannot be detected? For the detection people to ascertain whether you were using a colour TV, they’d need to obtain a court order to get into your house, surely? Giving you ample time to hide the offending equipment.

I'm completely guessing here, but I'm figuring that black and white sets are geared to respond to a narrower bandwidth, as they only need to figure out the brightness of the picture, now if there's a standard for this, it would probably be possible to send out the signal that makes tuned circuits resonate and thus be detectable at a freqeuncy that only colour TVs would care about - let me do a diagram...

Now! We all know that the regular bandwidth for a COLOUR telly channel is 27MHz, here at least, but b&w needs less, kinda like broadband and getting good quality streaming. Ignore the dots

..........[----------] < range of frequencies b&w telly is geared for
...[-------------------------] < range for colour

.....|.......................| < Frequencies used to detect colour tv's
...............|.| < Ditto but for black and white tv's

I'm figuring that they'd use two so they can be more certain.

This could, of course, all be bo locks!

I'm sure you would be tumbled if you suddenly changed from a Colour TV Licence to a Black-And-White one.

A way to get round buying a TV license as a student is to use a tv adaptor and a laptop - providing the laptop is powered by it's internal battery whilst being used as a tv you are covered by your home TV license. This unfortunatly doesn't work for digital TV as all these adaptors require a mains connection.... that is unless anyone could direct me to one that doesn't!

Gareth

Correct me if I'm wrong, and I know it sounds a bit counterintuitive, but do TV licence people actually need a court order/special permission to enter your house?

I thought they had a special statutory right to enter your home at will (although I'm sure they can't break in). Anyone want to discuss this with reference to the Human Rights Act...? Or, alternatively, inform me that I'm wrong...

I believe they require a court order.

and a police officer

All they can do is their usual frequent house visits and bombard you with mail. They are known to do this to people without a license.

At worst they could get a court order. You would just have to make sure that if you did have a colour tv, you had it positioned where you could remove any evidence that you were watching actual broadcasts with it. If there was a loud knock at the door one evening, you just flip off the tv and reel in the rf cable. Very difficult to prove if done correctly and connected to a games console via scart.

The problem with that is they can still get you with the 'for the ownership of a device capable of receiving colour tv signals' line. Otherwise it's annoying if everytime there's a knock at the door you have to turn off and unplug the TV.

Gareth

My Physics teacher has a black-and-white TV, and he says he keeps getting mail from them telling him he needs to upgrade his license if he's bought a colour TV, or he could still be done.


You'd still have an aerial on the top of your house, and all the TV channels tuned into your set. Besides, they will have already been able to tell if you had your TV on *before* they knocked. They're not stupid.

I wonder what the case is with pocket tv's...

You wouldn't need to have all the channels tuned into the colour tv - you could simply have them tuned into a vcr and swap the cables over as needed, and use the colour tv as "monitor".