What you'll notice
Perfect picture in clear weather. As soon as it rains — sometimes before the first drops — the picture pixelates, freezes, and often drops out completely, returning once the storm passes.
Why it happens
This is rain fade: water in the atmosphere absorbs satellite signal. It only causes visible failure when your installation has no headroom to spare — an undersized dish for the area, slightly-off alignment, a tired LNB, or losses in poor cable and connectors.
Some rain fade is unavoidable physics — in a truly violent downpour even an excellent installation can drop out for a few minutes. What is not normal is losing the picture in ordinary rain, or every time the sky merely looks threatening.
Margin is the whole story
Think of signal margin as headroom. A well-installed system in Gauteng typically runs with enough spare signal to shrug off most weather. Every defect eats into that reserve: a dish a few degrees off, an LNB slowly degrading, a corroded connector, thin unshielded cable, one split too many. Individually none of them break anything on a clear day — collectively they leave you with nothing in hand the moment it rains.
Where dish size is genuinely the answer
Signal strength across South Africa is not uniform. Toward the coast, in the southern Cape, and in the far Northern Cape, the footprint is weaker and a 60cm dish simply does not gather enough to carry a storm. In those areas an 80cm or 90cm dish is not an upsell, it is the correct specification — and if a previous installer fitted a 60cm because it was what was on the van, no amount of tweaking will make it behave.
What we will tell you
After measuring, we will say which of the two situations you are in: recoverable margin (fix the faults, keep the dish) or insufficient aperture (upgrade the dish). Those are different jobs at different prices, and you should know which one you are buying before you agree to it.
How we fix it
We measure your actual signal margin in clear conditions. Where alignment or hardware is stealing headroom we fix that; where the dish is genuinely too small for your area, we say so and quote an 80cm or 90cm upgrade rather than pretending a realignment will hold.
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.