Fitting a satellite dish? Choose the right scaffold.

For this job the choice lands on the wide Altrex RS TOWER 52, 135 cm from upright to upright, a model the hire range takes to 14.2 metres. Fitting a satellite dish keeps you well below that ceiling, since a build of 8 to 12 metres covers a two storey house. You use the width properly here: bowl, arm and foot lie loose on the deck before they go on the clamp, and the meter keeps a corner to itself. The other sizes sit in the full range of mobile scaffolds for hire.

With 245 cm of deck length the point is that nothing ends up under your boots. Fitting a satellite dish holds you on the same square metre for half a day, so you want a spanner set, a drum of coax and a cloth lying beside you rather than in a bag between your feet. If the only route to that elevation is an alley or a narrow gate, you hire the slim RS51 at 75 cm instead and give up part of that room.

This is where the job parts company with ordinary aerial work. A rooftop aerial goes wherever suits and is turned on picture quality; half a metre short and you slide the bracket along. A bowl needs its clear line south and that point is fixed, so you cannot shuffle it round a corner where your tower would stand more easily and your hire day would run shorter. The page covering tower hire for aerial work takes that difference further.

For fitting a satellite dish you measure to the top bolt of the bracket rather than to the rim of the bowl, because that bolt is what your spanner has to reach while you stand upright. On a three storey terrace that point often sits between seven and ten metres, since the bowl has to look over next door's roof to keep its southern line open. Hence a hire build of 8 to 12 metres. The page on a ten metre reach and what it covers shows what that involves.

Convert the reach back to a platform figure: add roughly two metres of arm and eye above the deck you stand on, and the floor lands somewhere between six and ten metres. Start the tape at the wheels, not at a threshold or the edge of a terrace. In a garden that alone can swallow half a metre, certainly when the paving sits higher than the lawn the tower finally ends up on. If the path to the shed falls away, measure at the lowest point where a wheel will stand.

Hiring too tight punishes you the moment you start aiming. Half a metre short means hanging off a clamp with your arms above your head while you try to adjust it by single degrees, and at that point you no longer feel what you are doing. You lock it on an angle that is almost right and you are back up there the next morning. Take the build above it; twelve metres of working height, described on its own page, shows what that extra section buys.

When you are fitting a satellite dish, where your tower stands follows from where the bowl goes, and that follows from the sky. A tree, next door's dormer or your own ridge tiles can block the southern line, which pushes the mounting onto the side elevation or round the back instead of neatly onto the street front. You rarely find a tidy driveway there. Reckon on garden work: lawn, a paved path, a border, or that strip of gravel along the shed.

So look at what lies under the four wheels first. Grass that gives way after a wet week is not a foundation and neither are lifted terrace slabs, so slide base plates or sound boards under them before you build any higher. Keep the ground clear all round for the stabilisers, which on a build like this reach a fair way out and in a back garden soon meet a fence, a downpipe or the edge of a canopy. For a sloping plot there is a guide to standing a tower on uneven ground.

Check the sightline before you drill, not after. Get up on the deck, look along the spot where the bowl will hang and watch for the crown of that one tree three gardens over, because in summer it carries a great deal more leaf. If the line is not clear the mounting moves to another elevation and your hired build moves with it. That is exactly why on this job you only fix the standing position after you have been up once.

Hanging the thing is straightforward work: mark the bracket, drill, set the plugs, get the mast plumb and lift the bowl onto it. For anyone who has done it before that is a morning. The aiming eats the rest of the day, because you find the setting in small steps, tighten, watch whether the picture holds and start again the moment a channel drops out. Two hire days is an honest plan for fitting a satellite dish, with the second given over to fine tuning and dressing the cable.

Those days also contain pauses you have no control over. The receiver indoors has to search again at every setting and that takes minutes each time. Someone has to watch the screen, and it is seldom the person up top doing the turning. If it blows hard the bowl shivers and the setting you locked yesterday is wrong by morning, so you wait. Each of those three can cost half a day, and they like to arrive on the same afternoon.

Booking with room to spare costs very little on this job. You pay the whole rate for one day and one night; every date after that drops by ninety five per cent, so a spare day barely moves the rental price. What does hurt is a second delivery run, needed because you struck the tower early and the bowl still wanted a degree. Set your end date a day past the point where you think the picture is finished. Estimating that is easier with the guide to working out hire days.

Fitting a satellite dish means you almost never move the tower, so that single position has to be right first time. Before you fix anything, step onto the deck and check whether the bottom bolt comes as easily to hand as the top one without leaning away sideways. Mark the holes while you are standing there, and shift the wheels now rather than later with half a mounting hanging on the wall. A position that is marginally wrong only announces itself after an hour of turning.

Send everything up in one trip: foot, arm, bowl, a set of spanners, the drill, sealant and the coax on a drum. Haul the bowl up on a line, because climbing the internal ladder with one under your arm goes wrong; loose, it already catches the wind. Lay a cloth or a piece of sheeting on the deck so nuts and drill bits do not vanish between the platform sections into the garden. Tick that list off at ground level, because a forgotten tool means ten metres down and ten back up.

You do the aiming with a meter clipped to the cable so you are not descending for every degree. Swing roughly south first, then set the elevation, and only after that the skew of the head. Tighten the clamp in stages and keep an eye on whether your reading sags as it goes up. Finish the coax with a drip loop under the entry point and tie it loosely along the mast, so pulling on the cable can no longer change the setting.

Your set turns up in loose parts, complete and counted, and that stack has to go somewhere. Point the spot out beforehand: every frame bound for a back garden goes through the gate or down the side path, and you would rather carry it once. Place the order on a working day ahead of the 15:00 cut off and the delivery van comes the following working day. That helps when the arrangement with whoever watches the screen indoors has only just been made.

You fill in the arrival day and the departure day yourself when you book. For fitting a satellite dish, arriving a day before the mounting suits best: you build at your own pace and start the turning the next morning rested. Putting the tower up counts as your part of the job, two people working layer by layer, and at this height it goes more calmly than you expect as long as you keep to the order. That order and the video that goes with it are in the step by step build instructions.

Once the bowl hangs and the picture holds, the build can come apart and you stack the parts; we come by to take them away. Wait, though, until a decent shower has passed over, because a bowl that still wants a degree is out of reach with no tower under it. Count as you stack and nothing stays behind in the border. The fixed amount for your province sits with the charges for bringing and collecting a set.

This deck sits in load class 3 of EN 1004, which allows 200 kg on a square metre. For fitting a satellite dish that is generous, although it adds up as soon as two of you are up there with a cordless drill, a box of spanners and a drum of cable. Spread that weight across the floor rather than piling it on the side where you are hanging and turning. The knowledge base carries a short explanation of what that standard means in practice.

Wind is the deciding factor on this job, because the bowl catches it the moment it is on the mast. Do not lift it up there on a gusty day and stop aiming when it picks up. The fixed rules stand: brakes on before you take the first rung, nobody and nothing aboard while the tower is moved, and after every move the four stabilisers set out and checked again. If you are unsure about a windy afternoon, waiting until tomorrow is cheaper than starting over.

Finally, stay on the deck. The temptation is real, since the bowl hangs close to the roof edge and stepping onto the tiles looks quicker. Do not: a pitched roof is not a working floor, and on this job there is no reason at all to leave the platform. Keep the strip below you clear as well, because a spanner dropped from ten metres lands in a garden where children or a dog may be. The wider agreements are in the rules for working safely at height.