Cost to replace a TV aerial

Be aware of wind loading.

Bill

Why on earth would you need to use proper rawl plugs when 13mm and plastic plugs are so much cheaper. Dont think Sky would be still using them if the dishes were falling off walls. If a customer critiscised my fixings he can go elsewhere.

Rawlbolts (or generic copies) are great in concrete or other strong substrates but they can be unreliable in soft brick. And they fail before you even load them in soft blocks. Plastic plugs are more reliable in some substrates.

He said Rawl Bolts (i.e. expanding sleeve anchors), a very different thing from Rawl Plugs.

Leaving aside the possible confusion between Rawlbolts and Rawlplugs, Sky dishes present minimal loading and windage.

Take a look at

and

Bill

I used Rawlbolts for my dish (65cm, installed about 10 years ago and still OK) because I considered 50mmx6mm screws a bit small for that size of dish. This is on Rustic bricks - the sort where chiselling a small flat area helps to get the hole in the right place - and they're fairly hard, judging by cutting holes for waste pipes.

plastic has a shorter life than steel

but you will be long gone when it falls off the wall...tee hee

I used hex-head masonry bolts for my (80cm? 70cm?) dish and it's also still fine, e.g.

Sky 'installers' seem to use hammer-in fixings round here. Great fun when its time to remove them :-(

Not outside. Lost count of the number of (what's left) of steel screws I've taken (almost fallen) out of plastic plugs then had trouble getting the plastic plug out.

This is because plastic combines with oxygen to form plastic oxide, commonly called 'rust'. Steel on the other hand does not degrade at all in the presence of oxygen. That's why steelhenge has stood the ravages of time for thousands of years.

Bill

In article , Grumps writes

I paid ?40 to have a guy replace my weather station. Similar sort of job to yours - and while he was up there he retied the loose cable to the TV aerial and tightened up the mounting bracket. But I'm not in Reading. However I did note that many aerial fitters seem to be operating through national franchises which bumps up the cost. You can always tell from the web site as they emphasise that they have local companies to do the job. A stand alone local business just says "Here we are".

That's a more reasonable price. But £85 was OK with me too.

Of the five companies I contacted via the web, one replied and said they were too busy to do work like that(!), one replied and said he could have a look in a fortnight, one said £85, and two haven't replied yet.

Some of these firms are absolutely dreadful. Unbelievable rip-offs in some cases. I have a large amount of evidence.

Bill

Most aerial firms will shy away from customers with specialised requirements. After all, why bother? From the aerial man's point of view radio amateurs can be an absolute nightmare. They are often extremely certain of technical facts but wrong.

Bill

It's not really specialised putting up a very simple antenna - which they didn't even ask about. All I'm essentially looking for is a man on the end of a long stick. A stick I'm not sure I want to climb. Maybe all I need to find is a handyman with a ladder instead.

And I'm sure you're right about PITA radio amateurs. I'm on the amateur end of the radio amateur scale, and wouldn't dare try to inform a professional installer like yourself.

it used to be said that many aerial riggers were former window cleaners who still had theri ladder.

I used a wrong word:'Specialised'. I should have said, "Anything he hasn't done a million times before." Many low-end domestic aerial installers want to cram in as many jobs as possible in the day. They don't want to waste time reading instructions, or even discussing the job with the customers. So they don't risk anything other than, "Please come and fix a telly aerial on my roof."

Because I had an actual interest in RF and a lot of curiosity, I generally accepted odd-ball jobs (although I might leg it later if I didn't like what I saw!) It paid off in my case because I ended up doing all sorts of jobs where one thing led to another, and some became very profitable.

Yes. Although fixing anything new to old masts and brackets is a bit dodgy sometimes.

Not all of them of course. But I did have a few bad experiences. There again I had some good ones, and I learnt a lot.

My most common interaction with 'hams' was the result of me being used by a local council as TVI tracer, after the Radio Regulatory Dept effectively threw the towel in. Most were dead reasonable and between us we usually found a solution. There was one guy, though ? I think he had a screw loose ? who used to deliberately wipe out my nearby system. In the end he lost his tenancy.

Bill