Rigger's Diary: today

I've been working on one of four blocks of flats that face each other
across a green. The van and the activity have been highly visible, and
of course it's been like poking a hornets' nest with a ****ty stick.
Net curtains have twitched, and the complaints have started to arrive
at the housing office. The housing manager emailed me thus: 'Have you
been drumming up business on there?' He knows really that allegedly
poor TV reception is infectious. It can spread through a complex like
a rumour of free beer at Tescos. Between us we decided to respond to a
sample of the complaints, just to get an idea of whether the other
systems needed a refurb. The block I’ve been working on was built a
couple of years before the others, and the TV system has always been a
problem. The others have not generated complaints for ages; in fact
until the other day I hadn’t set foot in two of them.

All of the blocks really need new systems with satellite, but that
isn’t going to happen.

I walked across the green to have a bit of a look round. There was one
mini-dish visible. It was on a front wall near the right hand end of
the building, angled to ‘look’ along the wall, yet it couldn’t see
28.2E I was sure. I walked round the back of two of the ‘unexplored’
blocks to have a look at the aerials. There was no aerial, but there
was a lot of dishes, and seeing them made it obvious that the one on
the front wall couldn’t be looking at any point on the Clarke belt.

I knocked on a door. I was shown an aged 14” portable in the living
room with a very snowy analogue BBC1 and a perfect analogue BBC2. In
the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and a
perfect analogue BBC1. “I do all my viewing in bed, you see, but if I
want to watch BBC2 I have to go in the room.”

“Annoying!”

“Oh, I’ve got used to it. It’s been like that for five years. I take
the duvet.” ITV and C4 were similarly confusing. There was no C5. The
two TV sets were both fed from a ‘booster’ in the living room. The
analyser showed me that signals from two relays were present. One is
Gp A and a bit weak in the area, the other is Gp CD and very strong in
the area. The normal main station would be Emley Moor, but there was
almost no signal from that transmitter. I shouldn’t have done it
before I’d investigated the system further but I re-tuned the two TV
sets to the Gp CD relay and astonished the resident with the results.
Rather than addressing me he delightedly explained the matter to his
cat. “Oh, Sigmund, the nice man has made our televisions better! We
can watch BBC2 in bed!”

I went to the flat of the one of the other main complainers in that
block. She was very nice. She put the telly on and said I looked
weary, and served tea in a teapot on a tray, and exotic chocolate
biscuits, and told me her life story, which in its small way was
astonishing. She went on to tell me how she had lost patience with
the housing people and had told the residents in the flat above that
they must get their leaking pipes fixed or she would ‘call in the
heavy mob’. I raised an eyebrow. “Pure bluff!” she giggled. “But
anyway, they sent for a plumber and he came, but he was totally drunk!
Totally legless! It would have been excusable, but it was the day of
an important football match, so you have to make allowances for these
people. He was very argumentative though, and the handyman from the
housing office was here as well, and he – the plumber chappy --
squared up to him and said he’d knock his block off! Well John the
handyman is six foot six (although he’s very thin, I think there’s
something wrong with him) and he’s a champion at ju jitso and he
whispered to me ‘I’d better not touch him or I’d end up in prison.’

“John’s very good though. When that dreadful trollop moved out – I
think she was on drugs – she hit the front door with a settee and the
glass went. Of course I was out like a shot and I said to her ‘You’ll
have to get that fixed or that’s your deposit gone my dear.’ So she
got a bloke from the Yellow Pages. He charged £245 and it wasn’t
safety glass. I told him to take it out again or he’d be prosecuted,
so he did, and then John came round and put some safety glass in for
£35. You see?’ I thought I saw.

Eventually, many eons later, we discussed her TV reception. “I must
tell you, I was quite content until Hercules discovered the digital.
But once we had it I was aware that it wasn’t perfect, and I do like
things to be, well, if not perfect, optimal.” I nodded in agreement.
We were in agreement that ‘optimal’ was a reasonable life target, and
there was a pause while we savoured the moment. The she reached for
the remote and said to herself, “Now let me see, ‘DTV’ that’s it!” She
stabbed the button, and a badly pixellated BBC News appeared. “As I
said, I didn’t know it was there until Hercules found it.”
“Err, Hercules?” She gestured towards a morbidly obese tomcat that
fully occupied (and in my opinion threatened to stain) a beautiful
Georgian chair, one of four.

“He sat on the zapper, and lo and behold I had digital! Isn’t he
clever?” I agreed that he was. The analyser showed almost no DTT. The
Gp A relay has DTT but no analogue C5.

The last complainer turned out to have the dish on the north-facing
front wall. I enquired about it. He had moved in and had been
frustrated by the lack of any useable digital reception, so had bought
a Freesat box. The shop had sent someone out to do the dish. The
someone had said it couldn’t be done at the price and had ‘just
buggered off without so much as a by your leave, you just can’t
believe these people’, so the resident’s partner had had some sort of
a butch paddy fit when he came home from his work and called in a
local installer, who had bolted a dish to the front wall, messed
around with it for ‘an age’, then simply disappeared, much like the
first one. The Freesat box sat below the TV set, useless. I explained
that the satellites were all to the south, so those in flats with
north-east and north-west facing walls couldn’t just put a dish on
their external walls. “Well that,” he said, “Is just typical
unfairness! Isn’t it just like everything else in this country?”

The buildings have very steep pitched roofs. There are four quite
large flats on each of four floors, and the roof comes to a central
apex. From this I could have worked out that the loft above the
stairway would be unusual, if I’d thought about it, but in fact I was
astonished when I poked my head up through the hatch. I could see two
aerials, about 30ft above me. I had to make a platform in the loft and
then haul a large ladder up there to stand on it. With the ladder well
secured I ascended and found two contract Gp A aerials, reposing on
the rafters, unfastened and unaligned. This place is actually on high
ground, and reception was random, with strong analogue on Gp CD (meant
for the nearby valley), weak analogue and digi from the Gp A relay,
and a little bit of analogue and DTT from Emley Moor. There was even a
bit of Waltham and Belmont in there.

Bizarrely, the first aerial was connected to the second, and the one
downlead went to a Labgear 6+1 amp. The ‘full’ output went to another
Labgear 6+1 amp, which was well into crossmod. I found that the Gp A
relay would provide more-than-adequate signal levels for both analogue
and DTT, so I installed a proper aerial, a log, and sorted the amps
out. Getting the ladder out of the loft and down the stairs was hard
work because I had used up the day’s supply of energy. I then had to
revisit the three flats to tune-in various things and consume more tea
and biscuits, and listen to more tarradiddle. I posted the standard
leaflets through the other doors. These basically say, “We came, you
were out, try it and ring us if necessary.” But most of the others are
using satellite, so they won’t respond.

Bill

Ah, so there is a real need for an RF transparent building material
obviously...
Brian

--
Brian Gaff -
Note:- In order to reduce spam, any email without 'Brian Gaff'
in the display name may be lost.
Blind user, so no pictures please!
" wrote in message
...
I've been working on one of four blocks of flats that face each other
across a green. The van and the activity have been highly visible, and
of course it's been like poking a hornets' nest with a ****ty stick.
Net curtains have twitched, and the complaints have started to arrive
at the housing office. The housing manager emailed me thus: 'Have you
been drumming up business on there?' He knows really that allegedly
poor TV reception is infectious. It can spread through a complex like
a rumour of free beer at Tescos. Between us we decided to respond to a
sample of the complaints, just to get an idea of whether the other
systems needed a refurb. The block I’ve been working on was built a
couple of years before the others, and the TV system has always been a
problem. The others have not generated complaints for ages; in fact
until the other day I hadn’t set foot in two of them.

All of the blocks really need new systems with satellite, but that
isn’t going to happen.

I walked across the green to have a bit of a look round. There was one
mini-dish visible. It was on a front wall near the right hand end of
the building, angled to ‘look’ along the wall, yet it couldn’t see
28.2E I was sure. I walked round the back of two of the ‘unexplored’
blocks to have a look at the aerials. There was no aerial, but there
was a lot of dishes, and seeing them made it obvious that the one on
the front wall couldn’t be looking at any point on the Clarke belt.

I knocked on a door. I was shown an aged 14” portable in the living
room with a very snowy analogue BBC1 and a perfect analogue BBC2. In
the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and a
perfect analogue BBC1. “I do all my viewing in bed, you see, but if I
want to watch BBC2 I have to go in the room.”

“Annoying!”

“Oh, I’ve got used to it. It’s been like that for five years. I take
the duvet.” ITV and C4 were similarly confusing. There was no C5. The
two TV sets were both fed from a ‘booster’ in the living room. The
analyser showed me that signals from two relays were present. One is
Gp A and a bit weak in the area, the other is Gp CD and very strong in
the area. The normal main station would be Emley Moor, but there was
almost no signal from that transmitter. I shouldn’t have done it
before I’d investigated the system further but I re-tuned the two TV
sets to the Gp CD relay and astonished the resident with the results.
Rather than addressing me he delightedly explained the matter to his
cat. “Oh, Sigmund, the nice man has made our televisions better! We
can watch BBC2 in bed!”

I went to the flat of the one of the other main complainers in that
block. She was very nice. She put the telly on and said I looked
weary, and served tea in a teapot on a tray, and exotic chocolate
biscuits, and told me her life story, which in its small way was
astonishing. She went on to tell me how she had lost patience with
the housing people and had told the residents in the flat above that
they must get their leaking pipes fixed or she would ‘call in the
heavy mob’. I raised an eyebrow. “Pure bluff!” she giggled. “But
anyway, they sent for a plumber and he came, but he was totally drunk!
Totally legless! It would have been excusable, but it was the day of
an important football match, so you have to make allowances for these
people. He was very argumentative though, and the handyman from the
housing office was here as well, and he – the plumber chappy --
squared up to him and said he’d knock his block off! Well John the
handyman is six foot six (although he’s very thin, I think there’s
something wrong with him) and he’s a champion at ju jitso and he
whispered to me ‘I’d better not touch him or I’d end up in prison.’

“John’s very good though. When that dreadful trollop moved out – I
think she was on drugs – she hit the front door with a settee and the
glass went. Of course I was out like a shot and I said to her ‘You’ll
have to get that fixed or that’s your deposit gone my dear.’ So she
got a bloke from the Yellow Pages. He charged £245 and it wasn’t
safety glass. I told him to take it out again or he’d be prosecuted,
so he did, and then John came round and put some safety glass in for
£35. You see?’ I thought I saw.

Eventually, many eons later, we discussed her TV reception. “I must
tell you, I was quite content until Hercules discovered the digital.
But once we had it I was aware that it wasn’t perfect, and I do like
things to be, well, if not perfect, optimal.” I nodded in agreement.
We were in agreement that ‘optimal’ was a reasonable life target, and
there was a pause while we savoured the moment. The she reached for
the remote and said to herself, “Now let me see, ‘DTV’ that’s it!” She
stabbed the button, and a badly pixellated BBC News appeared. “As I
said, I didn’t know it was there until Hercules found it.”
“Err, Hercules?” She gestured towards a morbidly obese tomcat that
fully occupied (and in my opinion threatened to stain) a beautiful
Georgian chair, one of four.

“He sat on the zapper, and lo and behold I had digital! Isn’t he
clever?” I agreed that he was. The analyser showed almost no DTT. The
Gp A relay has DTT but no analogue C5.

The last complainer turned out to have the dish on the north-facing
front wall. I enquired about it. He had moved in and had been
frustrated by the lack of any useable digital reception, so had bought
a Freesat box. The shop had sent someone out to do the dish. The
someone had said it couldn’t be done at the price and had ‘just
buggered off without so much as a by your leave, you just can’t
believe these people’, so the resident’s partner had had some sort of
a butch paddy fit when he came home from his work and called in a
local installer, who had bolted a dish to the front wall, messed
around with it for ‘an age’, then simply disappeared, much like the
first one. The Freesat box sat below the TV set, useless. I explained
that the satellites were all to the south, so those in flats with
north-east and north-west facing walls couldn’t just put a dish on
their external walls. “Well that,” he said, “Is just typical
unfairness! Isn’t it just like everything else in this country?”

The buildings have very steep pitched roofs. There are four quite
large flats on each of four floors, and the roof comes to a central
apex. From this I could have worked out that the loft above the
stairway would be unusual, if I’d thought about it, but in fact I was
astonished when I poked my head up through the hatch. I could see two
aerials, about 30ft above me. I had to make a platform in the loft and
then haul a large ladder up there to stand on it. With the ladder well
secured I ascended and found two contract Gp A aerials, reposing on
the rafters, unfastened and unaligned. This place is actually on high
ground, and reception was random, with strong analogue on Gp CD (meant
for the nearby valley), weak analogue and digi from the Gp A relay,
and a little bit of analogue and DTT from Emley Moor. There was even a
bit of Waltham and Belmont in there.

Bizarrely, the first aerial was connected to the second, and the one
downlead went to a Labgear 6+1 amp. The ‘full’ output went to another
Labgear 6+1 amp, which was well into crossmod. I found that the Gp A
relay would provide more-than-adequate signal levels for both analogue
and DTT, so I installed a proper aerial, a log, and sorted the amps
out. Getting the ladder out of the loft and down the stairs was hard
work because I had used up the day’s supply of energy. I then had to
revisit the three flats to tune-in various things and consume more tea
and biscuits, and listen to more tarradiddle. I posted the standard
leaflets through the other doors. These basically say, “We came, you
were out, try it and ring us if necessary.” But most of the others are
using satellite, so they won’t respond.

Bill

On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

[snip very interesting story]

Bill

I'm feeling particularly helpful today so I'm saving IanT
some work by pasting his usual replies for him...

What was the name and address of the company that
completed this installation?
There should be no problem in you naming them if what
you say is true as it will stop others being conned.

Too many installers lie about other peoples work,
then refuse to name the other company.
One person in this group does it all the time.

Do you think anyone is interested?

" wrote in message
...
I've been working on one of four blocks of flats that face each other
across a green. The van and the activity have been highly visible, and
of course it's been like poking a hornets' nest with a ****ty stick.
Net curtains have twitched, and the complaints have started to arrive
at the housing office. The housing manager emailed me thus: 'Have you
been drumming up business on there?' He knows really that allegedly
poor TV reception is infectious. It can spread through a complex like
a rumour of free beer at Tescos. Between us we decided to respond to a
sample of the complaints, just to get an idea of whether the other
systems needed a refurb. The block I’ve been working on was built a
couple of years before the others, and the TV system has always been a
problem. The others have not generated complaints for ages; in fact
until the other day I hadn’t set foot in two of them.

All of the blocks really need new systems with satellite, but that
isn’t going to happen.

I walked across the green to have a bit of a look round. There was one
mini-dish visible. It was on a front wall near the right hand end of
the building, angled to ‘look’ along the wall, yet it couldn’t see
28.2E I was sure. I walked round the back of two of the ‘unexplored’
blocks to have a look at the aerials. There was no aerial, but there
was a lot of dishes, and seeing them made it obvious that the one on
the front wall couldn’t be looking at any point on the Clarke belt.

I knocked on a door. I was shown an aged 14” portable in the living
room with a very snowy analogue BBC1 and a perfect analogue BBC2. In
the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and a
perfect analogue BBC1. “I do all my viewing in bed, you see, but if I
want to watch BBC2 I have to go in the room.”

“Annoying!”

“Oh, I’ve got used to it. It’s been like that for five years. I take
the duvet.” ITV and C4 were similarly confusing. There was no C5. The
two TV sets were both fed from a ‘booster’ in the living room. The
analyser showed me that signals from two relays were present. One is
Gp A and a bit weak in the area, the other is Gp CD and very strong in
the area. The normal main station would be Emley Moor, but there was
almost no signal from that transmitter. I shouldn’t have done it
before I’d investigated the system further but I re-tuned the two TV
sets to the Gp CD relay and astonished the resident with the results.
Rather than addressing me he delightedly explained the matter to his
cat. “Oh, Sigmund, the nice man has made our televisions better! We
can watch BBC2 in bed!”

I went to the flat of the one of the other main complainers in that
block. She was very nice. She put the telly on and said I looked
weary, and served tea in a teapot on a tray, and exotic chocolate
biscuits, and told me her life story, which in its small way was
astonishing. She went on to tell me how she had lost patience with
the housing people and had told the residents in the flat above that
they must get their leaking pipes fixed or she would ‘call in the
heavy mob’. I raised an eyebrow. “Pure bluff!” she giggled. “But
anyway, they sent for a plumber and he came, but he was totally drunk!
Totally legless! It would have been excusable, but it was the day of
an important football match, so you have to make allowances for these
people. He was very argumentative though, and the handyman from the
housing office was here as well, and he – the plumber chappy --
squared up to him and said he’d knock his block off! Well John the
handyman is six foot six (although he’s very thin, I think there’s
something wrong with him) and he’s a champion at ju jitso and he
whispered to me ‘I’d better not touch him or I’d end up in prison.’

“John’s very good though. When that dreadful trollop moved out – I
think she was on drugs – she hit the front door with a settee and the
glass went. Of course I was out like a shot and I said to her ‘You’ll
have to get that fixed or that’s your deposit gone my dear.’ So she
got a bloke from the Yellow Pages. He charged £245 and it wasn’t
safety glass. I told him to take it out again or he’d be prosecuted,
so he did, and then John came round and put some safety glass in for
£35. You see?’ I thought I saw.

Eventually, many eons later, we discussed her TV reception. “I must
tell you, I was quite content until Hercules discovered the digital.
But once we had it I was aware that it wasn’t perfect, and I do like
things to be, well, if not perfect, optimal.” I nodded in agreement.
We were in agreement that ‘optimal’ was a reasonable life target, and
there was a pause while we savoured the moment. The she reached for
the remote and said to herself, “Now let me see, ‘DTV’ that’s it!” She
stabbed the button, and a badly pixellated BBC News appeared. “As I
said, I didn’t know it was there until Hercules found it.”
“Err, Hercules?” She gestured towards a morbidly obese tomcat that
fully occupied (and in my opinion threatened to stain) a beautiful
Georgian chair, one of four.

“He sat on the zapper, and lo and behold I had digital! Isn’t he
clever?” I agreed that he was. The analyser showed almost no DTT. The
Gp A relay has DTT but no analogue C5.

The last complainer turned out to have the dish on the north-facing
front wall. I enquired about it. He had moved in and had been
frustrated by the lack of any useable digital reception, so had bought
a Freesat box. The shop had sent someone out to do the dish. The
someone had said it couldn’t be done at the price and had ‘just
buggered off without so much as a by your leave, you just can’t
believe these people’, so the resident’s partner had had some sort of
a butch paddy fit when he came home from his work and called in a
local installer, who had bolted a dish to the front wall, messed
around with it for ‘an age’, then simply disappeared, much like the
first one. The Freesat box sat below the TV set, useless. I explained
that the satellites were all to the south, so those in flats with
north-east and north-west facing walls couldn’t just put a dish on
their external walls. “Well that,” he said, “Is just typical
unfairness! Isn’t it just like everything else in this country?”

The buildings have very steep pitched roofs. There are four quite
large flats on each of four floors, and the roof comes to a central
apex. From this I could have worked out that the loft above the
stairway would be unusual, if I’d thought about it, but in fact I was
astonished when I poked my head up through the hatch. I could see two
aerials, about 30ft above me. I had to make a platform in the loft and
then haul a large ladder up there to stand on it. With the ladder well
secured I ascended and found two contract Gp A aerials, reposing on
the rafters, unfastened and unaligned. This place is actually on high
ground, and reception was random, with strong analogue on Gp CD (meant
for the nearby valley), weak analogue and digi from the Gp A relay,
and a little bit of analogue and DTT from Emley Moor. There was even a
bit of Waltham and Belmont in there.

Bizarrely, the first aerial was connected to the second, and the one
downlead went to a Labgear 6+1 amp. The ‘full’ output went to another
Labgear 6+1 amp, which was well into crossmod. I found that the Gp A
relay would provide more-than-adequate signal levels for both analogue
and DTT, so I installed a proper aerial, a log, and sorted the amps
out. Getting the ladder out of the loft and down the stairs was hard
work because I had used up the day’s supply of energy. I then had to
revisit the three flats to tune-in various things and consume more tea
and biscuits, and listen to more tarradiddle. I posted the standard
leaflets through the other doors. These basically say, “We came, you
were out, try it and ring us if necessary.” But most of the others are
using satellite, so they won’t respond.

Bill


A good story! I can imagine being there myself.....I particularly emphasise
with the "used up the day’s supply of energy" as I get this feeling quite
often when faced with similar ladder hauling exercises.

The worst ones are always inside, trying to get access to a hatch of some
decsription! My ladders split into 3 bits handily, and on several occasions
I've had to split them down, and carry up 2 sections individually, up 5 or
so flights of stairs, trying not to bash the walls and clothes line
residents as you go. I always hope to be rewarded by finding a juicy array
of botches up there.....

On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800, wrote:

In the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and
a perfect analogue BBC1.

No integrated digital TV tuner then?

Did you explain to the resident the benefit of getting a digital converter
box in order to watch non StretchyVision (tm) pictures on his expensive
widescreen screen?

" wrote in message
...

" and listen to more tarradiddle. ."

Bill

Indeed, that is what you subject this group to. If your story is not just
another complete work of fiction, name the previous company that
were responsible for the installations. There seems to be a typical sales
pattern emerging here. Go to a job, say previous work is rubbish and
then charge for everything to be done again. The only possible reasons
you refuse to name previous companies is because either you lied to
get the job or you are carrying out work that might not be required.
Only you know which one it is - I know which I suspect.
You are probably scared of Trading Standards investigating you and
companies that will sue you for saying their work is substandard.
Watch out as one day you might just be caught out.

wrote in message
...
On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

[snip very interesting story]

Bill

I'm feeling particularly helpful today so I'm saving IanT
some work by pasting his usual replies for him...

See below ;-)

On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:57:49 -0000, "Doctor D"
wrote:


wrote in message
.. .
On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

[snip very interesting story]

Bill

I'm feeling particularly helpful today so I'm saving IanT
some work by pasting his usual replies for him...

See below ;-)

ROFL!
I bet he wishes now he had read the other responses before rushing in.

I don't understand why you're so wound up about this.

--

Brian Gregory. (In the UK)

To email me remove the letter vee.

"Brian Gregory [UK]" wrote in message
...
I don't understand why you're so wound up about this.
Brian Gregory. (In the UK)


He must run flybynight aerials?

Steve Terry
--
Get a free Three 3pay Sim with £2 bonus after £10 top up
http://freeagent.three.co.uk/stand/view/id/5276