PROFESSIONAL INSTALLATION - Why It's Essential

Thank you Mrs Greaves of Northamptonshire for reading my article on Satellite Television and contacting me to respond to your enquiries.

I am now based in Malaysia but I occasionally help to design SMATV for a company I used to work with and trained their technicians and engineers in Harrow, Middlesex.

For the benefit of other readers, I would like at this opportunity, to restate the need for an accurate professional dish installation to ensure good picture quality and to avoid interference from adjacent satellites.

A misaligned dish increases the risk of interference. The misalignment may be caused by wind or by the incorrect pointing of the dish during its original installation. Due to the close proximity of other satellites - approximately 3 degrees from ASTRA ( in your case ) - it is important alignment is accurate. This 3 degrees separation guarantees an interference free reception by dishes that are correctly pointed.

If I may recall, we had similar problems in 1995 where an ongoing technical co-ordination between EUTELSAT and ASTRA causes minor interference if the dishes are slightly misappointed. I'm sorry I cant help you much on the technical aspects of the problem you are facing, since i left UK I am out of touch on the matter.

My best bet is to contact and consult the Confederation of Aerial Industries asking them to recommend any of their members located near you to check on your system. I can assured you that all CAI members commands respect and shows that all their technicians and engineers are of the highest calibre and work to the highest standards. Alternatively, you can contact your nearest authorised Sky TV dealer and the citizen advice bureau office for action against your previous installer.

The only way to ensure accurate pointing of the dish to the targetted satellite is to use a signal strength meter. Make sure your installer use a good quality channel selective signal meter inorder to get optimum signal from the satellite.

By using the signal strength meter he can adjust the azimuth/elevation and polarisation to optimise the received signal strength and picture quality not by referring to the signal indicator in the receiver/decoder itself.