DSTV Installation in Sunward Park, Boksburg

The part that determines how far a system can grow is the LNB on the front of the dish. A single-output unit feeds one decoder and nothing else. A twin feeds an Extra View pair. Beyond that you are into a multi-output LNB, or a multiswitch fed from the dish, which lets a number of decoders each receive a full signal independently.

It is much cheaper to fit the right one at the start than to change it later, because changing it later means a second visit, a second ladder, and possibly a second cable pull. So the first question we ask is not what you want today — it is what you might want within a couple of years. Cabling for a point you have not bought a decoder for yet costs almost nothing while the walls are already being drilled.

The tempting shortcut for a second TV is a splitter on the existing cable. It is the wrong tool here. A satellite feed is not a TV aerial feed: each decoder needs its own path back to the LNB, and splitting one weakens the signal to everything downstream. The result is two screens that both pixelate in the evenings, and a fault that looks exactly like a dish problem while the dish is perfectly fine.

We run a dedicated cable per decoder. Where several runs go the same way, they are bundled tidily and labelled at the decoder end, which turns a future fault from an afternoon of tracing wires into a two-minute check.

A screen in a covered outdoor area brings its own considerations: the cable end and any connection should be out of the weather even if the TV is under cover, and the decoder is usually better placed inside with only the HDMI run outside. For a study or home office the question is usually mounting — where the screen sits relative to the desk and the window, and whether the cable can come up behind the mount rather than hanging below it.

We test every point before we leave, on a real channel rather than on a signal bar, and we show you where the signal reading lives in the decoder menu so you have a number to quote us if something changes later.