A satellite dish is a passive reflector: no electronics, no moving parts, nothing to "wear out" in the usual sense. It gathers the signal arriving from a satellite roughly 36 000 km above the equator and concentrates it onto the LNB at the end of the arm. That signal is astonishingly weak by the time it reaches your roof, which is why the dish has to be aimed with real precision — and why a knock that looks trivial to the eye can take your picture away completely.
What size dish do you actually need?
Across most of Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the interior, a 60cm dish is sufficient for a standard installation. Move toward the coast, into the Western Cape, or into the far Northern Cape and the signal footprint weakens — there an 80cm or 90cm dish is the honest recommendation, not an upsell. A larger dish also buys you rain margin: extra signal headroom that keeps the picture up during a highveld thunderstorm when a marginal 60cm installation drops out. If your picture has always failed in heavy rain, dish size is usually the reason, and no amount of realignment will fix it.
Why alignment is the whole job
Aiming a dish involves three separate adjustments — azimuth (left/right), elevation (up/down) and LNB skew (rotation). All three have to be right simultaneously, and the acceptable error is smaller than most people expect. We align with a proper satellite meter that reads signal quality, not just strength, then lock every bolt and re-check. A dish "aligned by eye" will often work on a clear day and fail the moment weather arrives.
What actually goes wrong
In practice: wind loosens a bracket bolt, a painter or roof contractor knocks the arm, a tree that was a sapling three years ago now sits in the line of sight, rust eats through a bracket on the coast, or the dish was never large enough for the area to begin with. None of those are decoder faults — but all of them look identical on your TV.
Brands we fit and service
The satellite dish market splits into hardware built for South African conditions and lookalikes that fail at the first hard season. These are the manufacturers we trust on our installations:
- Ellies
- Triax
- generic 60cm/80cm/90cm offset dishes
See our brand guides for how these manufacturers compare.
When the satellite dish goes wrong
These are the failures we're called to most often — each with its symptoms, causes and our fix on the dedicated problems page:
- No signal at all (E48-32)E48-32, E30 — The screen shows "No signal being received" or an E48-32 message. Every channel is affected, not just some. It often app…
- Dish knocked out of alignment by wind — The picture worked perfectly until a storm or a spell of high wind. Now it is gone entirely, or breaks up badly on most …
- Picture breaks up in the rainE48-32 (intermittent) — Perfect picture in clear weather. As soon as it rains — sometimes before the first drops — the picture pixelates, freeze…
- A tree or new building has blocked the signal — The picture has degraded gradually over months or a year — first slight pixelation, then failures in weather, now regula…
- Aimed at the wrong satelliteE48-32 on some channels — A newly installed dish gives a picture on some channels but a large block of channels is missing entirely, and no amount…
Need this fixed or installed?
Our Satellite Dish Installation service covers satellite dish work — from R850, quoted upfront and backed by our 12-month workmanship warranty.