DSTV advice · Stellenbosch

Why Weather Knocks Out DSTV Signal Around Stellenbosch

Satellite television is a line of sight service. Your dish looks at a satellite
roughly 36,000km above the equator, and anything that gets between the two weakens
what arrives at your decoder. In the Cape Winelands, winter rain is the factor that shows up
most often in our callouts.

Rain fade is real, and it is not your installer’s fault

Water absorbs the frequencies satellite TV uses. During a heavy downpour even a
perfectly aligned dish can lose picture for a few minutes. The honest answer is
that nobody can eliminate rain fade. What a good installation does is give you
enough signal margin that only genuinely severe weather takes you off air.

Wind moves dishes more than people expect

A dish is a sail. Around the Stellenbosch mountains we see mounts that have shifted by a degree
or two after a hard blow, and a degree is enough to matter. The fix is not just
realigning it, but checking that the bracket is bolted into something solid and
that the fixings have not worked loose over the years.

What actually helps

• Proper alignment on a meter. Eyeballing the signal bar gets
  you to “working today”. A meter gets you to “working in bad weather”.
• A solid mount. Most drift we see comes from a bracket fixed
  into weak masonry or a mast that was never braced.
• Sealed connections. Water tracking down the cable into the
  LNB is a slow killer. Good weatherproofing at every joint pays for itself.
• Clear line of sight. Trees grow. A dish installed with a
  clean view five years ago may now be looking through branches.

Signs your margin is too low

If light rain interrupts your viewing, or you lose picture on windy days when
the sky is clear, your installation is working at the edge of its tolerance.
That is worth fixing, because it will only get worse as fittings age.

If that sounds like your setup, call 072 237 6363 and we will
measure what you are actually getting rather than guessing.