What you'll notice
Consistently weak signal with no obvious hardware fault, worse on some channels than others, and frequently worse on the TV furthest from the dish.
Why it happens
Attenuation. Coaxial cable loses signal per metre, and the loss increases with frequency — so long runs, or runs in thin cable, starve the far end. Every split compounds it.
This is a design fault rather than a breakage, which is why it never fully "fails" and never quite works either. It is most common on smallholdings, double-storey homes, and any property where the dish ended up a long way from the TV.
The physics, briefly
Every metre of coax costs you signal, and higher frequencies suffer more than lower ones. This is why the symptom is so often selective: the channels on high-frequency transponders break up while the rest look fine. As a rule of thumb, runs beyond about 40 metres in RG6 want RG11 instead, which has meaningfully lower loss per metre.
Amplifiers are not a free fix
An amplifier raises signal and noise together. Fit one where the real problem is a corroded connector and you amplify a degraded signal — louder, not clearer. Worse, too much gain overdrives the decoder's tuner and produces pixelation that looks exactly like too little signal, which is how installations end up with an amplifier turned right up and a picture that is worse than before. Correct practice is to measure the loss, apply matching gain, and verify at the worst outlet.
The cheapest fix is often geometry
Before specifying heavier cable or an amplifier, we look at whether the run can simply be shorter — a different wall for the dish, a more direct route through the roof, one fewer split. Removing thirty metres of cable is cheaper and more reliable than compensating for it.
How we fix it
We measure loss along the actual run, then fix it correctly: heavier RG11 cable where the distance demands it, a properly specified amplifier where it is genuinely needed, or a re-routed shorter run where one is available.
Still not working?
If the checks above haven't restored your coaxial cable & connectors, this usually needs a technician. Our Cabling & Point Repairs service covers exactly this fault — from R480, quoted upfront.