Rogues Gallery

We now come to one of our star exhibits. The art of aerial botchery is here taken to new heights, thanks to a firm who have a large Yellow Pages advert in several regions and claim to be professional installers. They aim their sales pitch at the builders of apartment blocks and they get a lot of business. A lot more than we will ever get in fact! Sometimes I hope there really is a Hell!

The first few shots show general views of the installation as I found it, two days before Christmas. It was a bitterly cold evening. A strong icy wind came from the north and it really was difficult to get anything done because every instinct said ‘get indoors you fool!’ As you can see I arrived after dark. Looking at the photographs, at first sight it’s like those mucky pictures that the older kids show you in the playground when you’re ten – you can recognise various items but you can’t figure out how it all fits together. I’ll try to clarify it for you. The dish has been fixed high on a 2” diameter aerial mast because at this position it needed to look over the roof. This was quite unnecessary and really was just pure stupidity. If the owners of the building had insisted on this dish location they were extremely misguided. I was able to fit a replacement dish on the wall just around the corner and of course that dish didn’t need to look over the roof at all. What’s more the dish was less of an eyesore than the original one had been.

Aerial masts are just not strong enough to support large dishes like this, and the installers knew it, so they added guy wires. Unfortunately they didn’t bother to provide proper anchor points for the guys. One was casually wrapped around an access ladder and another was knotted onto the safety wire on the top roof. Needless to say the mast snapped.

As you can see the DAB aerial has been fixed with the incorrect polarisation, and the three aerials are much too close together. What you can’t see is that the reflector on the UHF aerial had never been tightened and was ready to fall off. The LNB connections were not waterproofed to any significant extent. Later I was asked to take a look at the head end. The installation standard was very poor. All things considered, a total shambles from an apparently prestigious company.

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