First call today was a nice drive up to Wheddon Cross, some channels missing and others breaking up. The main problem was that the tv’s were all tuned to the Welsh, this can cause problems as the tide rises and falls, mainly because the signal is coming in on the side of the aerial. A bit of a retune to Mendip sorted most of the problems out, except for one tv…all the mendip frequencies had good strength and quality readings until I tried channel 52, which had much reduced signal quality and then channel 54 which had no strength or quality readings at all. One look at the cheap and nasty moulded aerial lead was all I needed, these are the type you can buy pre packed in places like Proper Job, my advice regarding that is don’t do it! A new piece of coax and all the higher frequencies were back.

Next one was the fault of the builders not knowing the difference between VHF and UHF, this was the second time in ten days that builders had put in the aerial system and plugged the aerial into the VHF input instead of the UHF one…a very easy job for me!

Last call today was to a ripped off Aerial Force customer, how they can charge £250 to install a satellite dish I’ll never know, the pole and the cable were already there, all they had to do was put the dish on the pole and line it up…what a con man. Well there was nothing I could do about that but the cheap Manhattan Freesat box from Argos was giving all sorts of problems, a bit more advice…don’t buy one of those either, go for the Humax HB-1100s, it’s twice the price but it will work well and last years. The poor customer is off back to Argos tomorrow to change her box for a Humax, it’s a shame she never needed a new dish at all, she could have saved herself a lot of money. It’s not the first time I’ve come up against Aerial Force or one of their sister companies, they even threatened to put me out of business once but they’re giving our trade a bad name so I’ll always stand up to them.