TV aerial repairs and installation in West Hampstead

West Hampstead's tall red-brick terraces sit either side of West End Lane, Mill Lane and Sumatra Road, hemmed in by three separate railway lines that converge around the station and cut through back gardens and rear extensions across much of the area. Many of the terraces were built with generous depth and have since had substantial rear extensions or loft conversions added, changing the roofline and often the usable sightlines from the original build. Reception towards Crystal Palace is generally workable across the area, but the combination of tall neighbouring terraces, deep rear extensions and the railway cuttings themselves means individual roofs and rear walls need checking on their own merits rather than assumed from the street.

Conversion into flats is the norm on the taller terraces, and the aerial cabling inside them has typically grown piecemeal as flats changed hands or were re-let, with a single rooftop aerial often found feeding four flats through basic passive splitters rather than a proper powered distribution system. Whichever flat sits furthest down that chain of splitters gets the weakest signal by simple arithmetic, which is why the top-floor or rear flat is so often the one reporting problems while the ground-floor flat, closer to the splitter, has no complaints at all.

The fix in these buildings is generally about the wiring rather than the aerial itself: one clean feed from a single well-sited aerial, replacing passive splitters with a properly powered distribution amplifier, and running a dedicated cable to each flat rather than daisy-chaining outlets. This is normally a cheaper piece of work than a fresh aerial installation and the improvement shows immediately on a signal meter, particularly for flats at the end of a long-neglected chain.

Deep rear extensions, common where a Victorian terrace has been extended into the garden over one or two storeys, frequently block a satellite dish sightline that would otherwise be perfectly usable from the original rear wall, so a line that looks clear on a plan or an old photograph can be obstructed in practice by works carried out since. We check the actual sightline from the current wall or roof slope rather than relying on what a neighbouring or similar house achieves, and on tall terraces here a gable bracket is often preferred over a chimney lashing where the stack itself looks tired or has been re-pointed unevenly over the years.