DSTV Repairs & Realignment in Birchleigh

If the picture has gone and the weather has passed, start at the plug. Switch the decoder off at the wall for ten seconds and back on, and check the cable is screwed in firmly at the back. If there are no lights on the decoder at all, try a different socket before assuming the unit is dead.

What we would rather you did not do is go up to look at the dish. A wet roof is a genuinely dangerous place and the dish tells us nothing from up there that a meter at ground level cannot tell us properly.

A dish that has been nudged by wind often looks completely normal from the garden. A degree or two is invisible to the eye and very visible on a meter, and it is the most common repair we do after a rough week of weather. We re-point it, then deal with the reason it moved: a bracket that has worked loose, a fixing into something that flexes, or a mast that needs a firmer base.

Rain finds connectors. We open the outdoor joints, look for corrosion and moisture, replace the fittings that have suffered and reseal them properly rather than wrapping tape round the old ones.

A nearby strike can reach a decoder through the power supply or the dish cable, and the damage is usually obvious — the unit simply does not come on. Unplugging the decoder from the wall when a storm is coming is the simplest protection there is, and it costs nothing.

Storm damage is quoted as its own job rather than covered by the workmanship guarantee on an installation, and we will say up front whether what we are looking at is damage or ordinary wear. Where a decoder is genuinely finished, we will tell you that instead of charging for a diagnosis you already suspected.