Provided you have the room to stand the dish, there's no reason why you can't have it inside the awning. The awning fabric won't block the signal, even when it's wet (although in marginal signal areas in mainland Europe, it's bound to have at least some effect). Furthermore, the dish will be protected from strong winds. Or at least it will be until the awning blows away into the next county!

And the other advantage is that it won't be obvious from the outside, (for those people too embarrassed to admit to taking satellite TV away with them ).

And there have been stranger uses to which an awning has been put. At the CC Park Coppice site in the Lake District July 2004, caravanners strolling past may have been bemused to see a red Peugeot parked in an awning! Well, that was us, and there was a reason. The car had a leak at the base of the windscreen so that in heavy rain (and boy, did it rain that summer!), water ran down into the engine compartment and on to a wiring loom. It then travelled along the loom before dripping from the lowest point - straight on to the systems interface circuit board that controls all the electrics.

The results were spectacular: the headlights and brake lights would switch themselves on spontaneously (not necessarily at the same time), the remote central locking would refuse to work, the traction control warning light would come on to warn me the system had turned itself off, and best of all, one of the windows wound itself down during the night! We couldn't discount the possibility that the car might start itself up, put itself into gear and drive off into the lake! So we decided the only way we could keep the car secure, and the battery from running itself down, was to garage the vehicle. And where better than the awning!

This is how we had the car after the rear window wound itself down and wouldn't go back up again! Later on, we parked the car front end in to keep the rain off the engine compartment.

Hiding your dish at home

There might be legitimate reasons for disguising your dish at home. Your neighbours might object, your landlord might object, the local authority might object. Or you yourself don't want a dish on your front wall and visible from the road. There are a number of ways in which you can disguise it.

For a start, if you simply don't want it on the front wall despite the front being south-facing, you can probably mount it on a mast at the back of the house. If the mast projects say 1 metre (oh dammit, 3 feet - I'm unreconstructed!) above the eaves, its line of sight to the satellite should easily clear the roof ridge. If the terms of your lease prohibit the attaching of satellite dishes to any part of the building, you can if you have the space place it in the back garden and run the cable back to the house. The dish can be fixed to a pole driven into the ground or set in concrete. Just make sure the cable is protected from accidental damage by garden tools etc.

Another alternative is to paint the dish so that it blends in with the wall. I've even seen a dish painted to match the bricks, including the mortar lines! Try to use a matt non-metallic paint. Ross Lockley's website www.analoguesat.co.uk has further details. Click the Technical Documents link at the left.

The other option is quite radical and at first may beggar belief. Nevertheless it does work as the next picture proves. If you have a flat-roof extension, mount the dish on its back so that the LNB arm points upward. The only part visible from below will be the LNB arm and will be so insignificant as to be virtually invisible anyway. Even if a local busybody sees it, he's unlikely to recognise it for what it is! Make sure you use a perforated dish so that rainwater can't collect in the bowl. The angle of the dish will have to be arranged so that the satellite signal reflects off it and upwards to the LNB - the reverse of the conventional method of fitting. I'll leave such calculations to the ingenuity of the reader - I'm just the messenger. Thanks to my mate Gary in Benidorm who sent me the picture.