What you'll notice
The dish visibly moves in the wind, the picture breaks up in gusts, and the whole assembly can be rocked by hand.
Why it happens
Fixings have worked loose, were fitted into mortar joints or weak substrate rather than solid brick, or the bracket is undersized for the dish it carries.
A loose bracket does not merely risk the dish falling; it guarantees recurring signal loss, because alignment cannot hold on a mount that moves.
Where fixings fail
Overwhelmingly: anchors driven into mortar joints instead of the brick itself. Mortar is soft and crumbles under the repeated cyclic loading of a dish in wind. Plaster and single-skin walls are similarly inadequate. Correct practice is expansion anchors into solid brick or concrete, sized for the load, all four of them.
Wind load is not trivial
A 90cm dish is effectively a sail. In a Highveld storm the force on its mounting is considerable, applied repeatedly over years. Brackets and fixings that would be fine for a hanging basket are nowhere near adequate, and the failure is progressive — a little movement, then more, then a lost picture, then in the worst cases a dish in the garden.
Safety, plainly
A dish coming off a double-storey wall is genuinely dangerous. If yours can be rocked by hand, treat it as urgent rather than as a picture-quality annoyance.
Re-alignment is part of the job
Any work on the mount moves the dish. We re-peak on a meter afterwards as standard — a bracket repair that leaves you with a wobble-free dish and no picture is not a repair.
How we fix it
We re-fix into solid material with correctly sized anchors, upgrade the bracket where it was never adequate, and re-align afterwards — because any bracket work moves the dish off beam.
Still not working?
If the checks above haven't restored your dish mount & bracket, this usually needs a technician. Our Satellite Dish Installation service covers exactly this fault — from R850, quoted upfront.