DSTV Installation and Repairs in Rynsoord, Benoni

Benoni sits high on the Highveld, at about 1,655 m, and summer afternoons here produce the kind of weather that finds every weakness in an outdoor installation. Heavy rain will briefly interrupt a satellite signal on any dish, anywhere — that part is normal and it clears when the cloud does. What is not normal is a picture that never comes back.

When it does not come back, the usual suspects are a dish that has been pushed out of alignment, water that has got into a connector during the downpour, or a decoder that took a knock through the power supply during a nearby strike. We check in that order, because the first two are cheap and the third is the one people assume first.

We start at the dish with a meter, which shows strength and quality separately — the decoder's own on-screen bar hides the distinction and that distinction is usually the whole answer. A good reading at the dish and a poor one at the TV puts the fault in the cable or a joint. A poor reading at the dish points to alignment, the LNB, or something that has appeared in the line of sight.

Only once we know where the loss is do we replace anything. Swapping parts in order of convenience is how a simple fault turns into an expensive afternoon, and it is why we will sometimes tell you the problem is a two-rand connector rather than the decoder you were ready to replace.

Once the picture is back, the useful five minutes is spent on what caused it. Cable that has gone chalky in the sun, a mount that was never quite tight, a connector that was taped instead of sealed — these get fixed while we are there rather than being left to fail again after the next big storm.

The single most effective thing you can do yourself costs nothing: unplug the decoder at the wall when a serious storm is coming over. Most of the dead decoders we see arrived that way.