TV aerial repairs and installation in Hampstead

Reception across Hampstead comes almost entirely off Crystal Palace, but the path from a south-facing chimney on Church Row is a very different proposition to a north-facing rear slope on the far side of Christchurch Hill, where the Heath's tree canopy and the rise of the hill itself sit between the roof and the transmitter. Slate is the dominant roof covering on the older Victorian terraces, with London stock brick chimney stacks that have often taken decades of pointing repairs, while the villas on Frognal and Redington Road tend towards clay tile and generous loft voids that make internal aerial mounting a realistic option where an external fixing would be awkward. Satellite dishes on the taller houses need a clear line south-south-east towards 28.2 degrees east for Sky and Freesat, and the closer, steeper terraces sometimes lose that path behind a neighbour's roofline long before any tree gets in the way.

Chimney stacks on the older terraces off Flask Walk and Well Walk have generally stood since before television aerials existed, so before fitting any bracket and lashing kit we check the pot, the flaunching and the brickwork for movement rather than assuming the stack will simply take the load. A stack with frost-damaged coping or loose rendering isn't a safe fixing point regardless of how good the reception would be from up there, and on those we'll either strengthen the fixing with a wall-mounted bracket lower down or move to a loft-mounted aerial if the roof covering and signal strength allow it. Lashing kits themselves need checking every few years too, since the wire ties that hold an aerial pole to a chimney can work loose or corrode, and a surprising number of the callouts we get for a suddenly pixelating picture turn out to be nothing more than a slipped mast rather than a failed aerial.

Tree cover is the single biggest variable in this postcode. The plane and lime trees along Well Walk and the mature gardens backing onto the Heath put a lot of moving foliage into the signal path during the summer months, and because wet leaves absorb UHF far more than bare winter branches, a picture that's rock solid in January can start breaking up by June on exactly the same aerial. We deal with this by aiming for more signal margin than the winter reading alone would suggest is necessary, sometimes stepping up from a standard aerial to a high-gain model, and by avoiding positions that look clear on a still February morning but sit directly behind a tree canopy once it's in full leaf.

The converted villas around Fitzjohn's Avenue and Redington Road generally run a shared IRS or communal coaxial system serving each flat, installed at conversion and extended piecemeal since, and a fault reported by one resident is very often traceable to a splitter or amplifier in a communal riser cupboard rather than anything wrong in the flat itself. Because so much of this area sits in a conservation area with a good number of listed buildings, cable for both aerials and dishes is run through existing ducts, redundant chimney flues or beneath floorboards wherever possible rather than surface-clipped across a rendered or brick elevation, and dish fixings on flats generally need the freeholder's agreement before anything goes on a shared wall or roof.