What you'll notice
The picture worked perfectly until a storm or a spell of high wind. Now it is gone entirely, or breaks up badly on most channels while a few still hold.
Why it happens
Wind loading on a dish is substantial and relentless. If a bracket bolt was not torqued properly, or the mount was fixed into mortar or a weak substrate, the whole assembly gradually rotates. Only a couple of degrees is needed to lose lock.
This is the most seasonal fault we see, and it clusters exactly where you would expect: after the first serious Highveld thunderstorms in spring, and through the Cape's winter fronts.
Why "a couple of degrees" is enough
The satellite is around 36 000 km away. At that distance the beam your dish must stay inside is genuinely narrow, and the tolerance at the dish end is a fraction of a degree for a 90cm reflector. A movement far too small to notice from the ground is more than enough to take you from a perfect picture to nothing at all.
The tell-tale partial failure
A dish slightly off beam often keeps working on some channels while others break up. That is not random: different channels sit on different transponders, at different frequencies and polarities, with different link margins. The weakest ones fail first. If you have lost some channels rather than all of them, marginal alignment is the leading suspect — and it is a warning that total failure is close.
Fixing the cause, not the symptom
Any installer can re-aim a dish. If the mount that let it move is left as it was, you will call someone again after the next storm. We check the fixings, the substrate they went into, and the bracket's suitability for the dish size, and we tell you plainly if the mounting is the real problem.
How we fix it
We re-peak the dish on a meter — azimuth, elevation and LNB skew — then correct the underlying reason it moved: re-torquing, re-fixing into solid material, or replacing an undersized bracket. Simply re-aiming a dish on a bad mount guarantees a repeat callout.
Still not working?
If the checks above haven't restored your satellite dish, this usually needs a technician. Our Satellite Dish Installation service covers exactly this fault — from R850, quoted upfront.