Two winds, two different kinds of damage
Simon's Town gets worked over by weather twice a year, in two quite different ways.
The winter north-wester arrives with the cold fronts between roughly May and August. It is the wet, heavy wind — gusty, loaded with rain, and often blowing hard for a day and a night. This is what physically moves dishes. It also drives water into any joint that is not properly sealed, which is why the failures often show up two or three days after the storm rather than during it.
The summer south-easter is drier but relentless, blowing for days at a time through the warmer months. It does less dramatic damage and far more cumulative damage: constant vibration that loosens bolts, fatigues brackets and works fixings out of masonry, plus the salt load it carries up off the bay.
Why a few millimetres matters so much
Your dish is aimed at a target more than 35,000 kilometres away. The reflector focuses a very narrow slice of sky onto the LNB, and the accepted aiming tolerance is a fraction of a degree. A movement you would struggle to see by eye at the bracket translates into a very large miss at the far end.
This is why "it looks fine to me" is not a useful diagnosis, and why a proper realignment is done on a signal meter rather than by nudging the dish while somebody shouts from the lounge.
Signal strength is not signal quality. A storm-shifted dish frequently still shows a healthy strength number on the decoder's setup screen while quality has fallen off a cliff. Quality is the figure that determines whether you keep a picture in the rain.
The warning signs before total failure
Very few dishes fail all at once. They warn you first, usually for weeks:
- Pixelation or freezing that appears only in wind or rain and clears afterwards.
- An E48-32 error that comes and goes, rather than staying on permanently.
- A signal quality reading that is noticeably lower than it used to be.
- Some channels dropping out before others — the transponders sit at different frequencies and the weakest go first.
- Anything visibly out of true: a dish sitting at a slightly different angle to how you remember it, a rust streak below the bracket, a cable pulled taut where it used to hang loose.
Acting at that stage turns a scheduled visit into a small job. Waiting turns it into an emergency callout on the Saturday of a long weekend, which is when everybody else on the False Bay coast is calling too.
What we do on a storm callout
The sequence is always the same, because guessing wastes your money:
- Inspect before adjusting. Bracket condition, fixings, mast plumb, LNB seating and boot, cable dressing and every external joint.
- Measure at the dish. A meter at the LNB output separates a dish problem from a cable problem from a decoder problem within minutes.
- Realign and peak. Elevation, azimuth and LNB skew, optimised across several transponders rather than the one channel that happens to be on.
- Fix what let go. Re-tension or upgrade the bracket, replace corroded connectors, replace the LNB if it has taken water, reseal every joint.
- Re-measure and record. You should be told the final strength and quality figures, so there is a baseline to compare against next time.
Making the next storm a non-event
Storm resilience is designed in, not bolted on afterwards. On exposed positions we specify heavier brackets and shorter masts, because a long mast is a lever that multiplies wind load at the fixing. We anchor into sound masonry rather than render, leave a proper drip loop so water runs away from the connector instead of into it, seal joints with self-amalgamating tape, and clip cable runs at sensible intervals so the wind cannot use a loose span to work the connector loose.
Choosing a sheltered mounting position in the first place is worth more than any of it. Where a gable and an eave both work, the eave wins — a decision made on installation day that quietly saves callouts for a decade.
Insurance, warranties and honest expectations
Storm damage to a dish is sometimes covered by household insurance, so if a bracket has torn out of a wall it is worth asking your insurer before assuming otherwise. We will give you a written description of the damage and the work for that purpose.
Our workmanship warranty covers our installation. It does not cover an act of weather on a dish we did not install, and no honest installer will tell you a dish is storm-proof. What a properly built installation buys you is that ordinary Cape winter weather stops being an event.
Book before the front arrives
If your picture has been breaking up in bad weather, get a realignment and maintenance visit booked now rather than after the next front. If you are already looking at a permanent error code, decoder repairs and troubleshooting is the right starting point. Callouts start from R550 and include diagnosis, signal testing and minor repairs, with any parts quoted upfront.