TV and AV installation, Inner West.

Ray has been on the tools for forty years, is fully licensed and insured, and does the work himself. That matters more than usual on a terrace, because the person quoting has to already know how the cable is getting from the roof to the front room, and there is no second visit to work it out.

Kenneth in Balmain called about a dead picture. Ray arrived within the hour, pulled the old antenna, ran new cabling and left. In Kenneth's words: “now it's the best reception we've had in years.”

What makes the Inner West different

Strong signal, tired cable

The Inner West sits close in to the transmitters, so the signal arriving at the antenna is usually healthy. Then it goes into brown 1970s coax, screw-on plugs and a splitter in the roof space nobody has looked at since. We meter at the antenna and again at the wall plate. More often than not the antenna is fine and everything wrong is between the two, which is a much cheaper morning than the new installation you were bracing for.

The terrace is the job, not the TV

Newtown, Balmain, Annandale, Erskineville, Glebe. Solid double brick, a party wall shared with the neighbour, single-skin walls at the back, and a roof space you cannot crawl through. There is no cavity to drop a cable down and no ceiling void to run it across. Every terrace quote we give starts with working out the route, because the route is where the time and the money actually go.

Heritage controls cover most of the map

Haberfield is a conservation area end to end, and Balmain, Annandale, Glebe and much of Leichhardt carry controls of their own. A street-facing rooftop antenna is a problem in all of them. We site on the rear pitch and give up a few decibels, which the Inner West can comfortably afford precisely because the signal here is strong to begin with.

Warehouse conversions have nothing to hide cable in

The converted stock through Marrickville, Erskineville and St Peters has concrete slab ceilings and exposed brick walls. Drilling into a post-tensioned slab is not happening and neither is chasing a heritage brick wall. Surface work done properly is the answer: matched trunking, straight lines, and cable dressed so the result reads as deliberate rather than as an afterthought.

You are under the flight path, and a cinema room has to allow for it

Marrickville, Tempe, St Peters and Sydenham live with aircraft noise. It lifts the room's noise floor, and the noise floor is the number that decides how loud a system has to play before dialogue is intelligible. We measure it before specifying speakers, because a system tuned as though the room were quiet will have you reaching for the remote every ninety seconds.

Inner West

What we get called for here

• 02

  TV Antenna Repairs & Extra Points

  Old coax, corroded plugs and forgotten roof splitters, metered end to end before anything gets replaced.

• 01

  TV Installation & Wall Mounting

  Party walls and solid double brick, with the cable route settled before we quote the bracket.

• 03

  Digital TV Antenna Installations

  Sited on the rear pitch to keep conservation-area rules happy, which the signal here can carry.

• 07

  Data Cabling & Network Cabling

  Cat6 through terraces and warehouse conversions with no ceiling void to hide it in.

• 04

  Home Theatre Systems

  Cinema rooms specified against the room's real noise floor, flight path included.

• 09

  Wi-Fi Access Points & Whole-Home Mesh

  Coverage down a long narrow terrace, where one router at the front never reaches the back.

Common questions

Can you run cable in a terrace with no roof space?

Yes, and it is most of what we do in the Inner West. With no crawlable roof and no wall cavity, the cable goes another way: down through the ceiling rose, up an old chimney breast, behind the skirting, or outside in conduit painted to match. Which one works depends on the house, so the route gets worked out at the quote rather than discovered on the day.

My antenna looks fine but the picture is not. What else could it be?

In the Inner West, usually the cable. A lot of homes here still run the original brown coax with screw-on plugs, often through a splitter in the roof that was added for a second TV decades ago. Signal can be strong at the antenna and unusable at the wall plate. We test at both ends, which is a short job and frequently saves the cost of an antenna that never needed replacing.

Will an antenna on my roof be a problem in a heritage conservation area?

It can be if it is visible from the street, and Haberfield, Balmain, Annandale, Glebe and parts of Leichhardt all carry controls. In practice we site the antenna on the rear pitch, out of the streetscape. That costs a small amount of signal, and the Inner West has enough signal to spare because it sits close to the transmitters.

Do you cover the Inner West seven days?

Yes, seven days, with same-day service often available. Ray covers Balmain and Rozelle through to Marrickville and Ashfield, and carries antennas, cable, brackets and test gear in the van so most jobs finish on the first visit.