We live in a windy area and our gable-wall mounted Sat Dish is right in the blast-path. We have trees in the garden, so this was the only house-mounted position we could have used. I'm fed-up with having to get the Sat-man to come out to re-position the dish after every windy-period, so I'm moving it to a low-lying post in my garden. This will involve burying cable for a 4 metre run between house and post.

Is there a particular-type of protective trunking that I'll need for the cable(s)?

Cheers!

They don't carry any dangerous voltage so nothing really to worry about. Is your dish 'solid' or the type with loads of little holes in the big reflector part?

Cant you just tighten the bolts? Moving it sounds a bit extreme to me. besides, you can buy a sat finder for satellite dishes that beep when on target.

If your still going to bury the cable, i would put it in a 3" drainpipe for ease of replacement when it gets damaged / eaten.

Why not put some alignment marks on the mounting so you can put it back yourself if it moves.

Any PVC drain pipe will work fine - forty five degrees down to the required depth, then horizontal, then forty five degrees up - easier to pull cable through. Just put a rope or cable in it when burying, and then use that to pull through the sat cable.
Does sound like it's not mounted very well though.

if you are going a short distance use 25mm plastic water pipe.
We use this all the time for short runs for CCTV cables.

once you get over 40 metres the cable gets a bit hard to draw through.
go for 50 - 75 mm drain pipe after that.

remember to thread your draw rope in first though

PVC drainpipe, or even a piece of hose pipe. Seal the ends against water, as you dont want the cable sitting in water, as it will eventually go porus / leak.

The trick is to get it fairly deep, ie a spade depth, is good.
1. It stops you digging it up when weeding the garden etc.
2, More importantly, it protects the cable against frost... Back to it sitting in water here!... small crack, water in, freezes and opens the crack etc etc.

Its only a short length, but burying it is good.... Or our kids will mow the lawn and not take care around the cable area and slice the cable up. Which is what mine did.

I also agree get a sat finder signal strength meter, then you can re-align your dish for nothing when ever you need to.

Also make sure you have a drip loop of cable where it enters the LNB (Dish end) to stop water running into the connector.

Seal the LNB connector with Self Amalgamating Tape (From Screwfix or toolstation) then put a layer of ordinary PVC tape over the SA tape to protect it from the weather.

Getting moisture in your Sat TV co-ax is a real signal killer. Consider the price of a few metres of cable.... its not a lot of money and is often overlooked.

How old is the old cable? More than 5 years? Replace it with a new piece. Use CT100 or CT125 (minimum) spec cable if its just a single Coaxial cable ie no power or polarisation wires needed.
Make sure you get the right sized "F" (type) connectors for the cable.

Hope this helps.

Cheers and Happy New year

you already have a signal level indicator built in to your sky box so no real need to buy a meter.

I have a sky dish for the caravan and never use the meter which I bought - I just look at the set up page on the Sky box /tv when setting it up.

As long as you can reach the dish easily it's an easy DIY job.

Cheers

Mark

Cheers guys! Plenty of advice there!

PS - to answer some of the Q;s...

The current mount is as secure as a secure thing - but, honest, this is not just your normal wind we're talking about!
It was all new equipment 18 months ago.
It's the perforated dish.

I fitted a freesat dish at ours earlier in the year. It came with a free signal strength meter which was worse than useless as it beeped every time it picked up a signal from any old satellite so I spent a lot of the afternoon watching the Pope on Vatican TV. I then found dishpointer. Put your postcode in and with a compass and a bit of patience it soon worked perfectly. The bit that made most improvement to the signal after I lined it up and set the elevation was the LNB skew which really locked it in and improved the signal quality up to 84%. Remember when you are setting it up it doesn't work like the terrestrial aerial and you only move a few millimetres at a time then give it a few seconds to stabilise, you can't just wave it round and expect it to find anything

[Edited on 29/12/10 by Peteff]

Cheers Peter... will look into it!