In California the cable tv companies are under the radar. But just how strict should enforcement be? Is a permit required every tiome they get a new customer and string cable to the TV room? How about the Dish that gets mounted to the fascia? Do you not have enough to do already?
Funny you should ask.
A number of years ago I ended my cable TV contract and switched over to satellite. Having seen what they typically do and not wanting a bunch of black spaghetti strung all around my house, I bought a spool of coax and prewired all the bedrooms, bringing all the cables up through the attic and out through the soffit at the point where the dish would have to be mounted. I left about three feet of each cable hanging out for them to make the connections to the dish.
A team of two guys who barely spoke English showed up. The first thing they wanted to do was to run a ground wire from the dish location to the metal downlead to the electric meter enclosure. To get there, the cable would have to run about 15 feet along the eave/soffit to the stone chimney, make a 90-degree turn, go out about three feet, make another 90-degree bend, run along the face of the chimney about six feet, make another 90-degree bend, run about 25 feet along the back of the house to the corner of the garage, make another 90-degree bend, run about 15 feet along the end of the house, then make a final 90-degree bend down to where they wanted to clamp onto the steel pipe downlead. All that wire on the outside of the house was exactly what I had wanted to avoid, so I sent them packing and started doing my homework.
This took place when I was at a former department. I asked the boss about grounding and bonding of satellite dish antennae, and he said he didn't know anything. BUT ... he knew the guy who at that time was the editor for the NFPA 70 Handbook, so the boss called up his editor friend and asked him. And his editor friend said "Yeah, there's probably something in here but I don't have a clue. Let me check it out and I'll get back to you." And he called back, either later that day or the next day. He confirmed that a satellite dish needs to be grounded AND BONDED. The length of the grounding conductor isn't supposed to exceed (IIRC) 20 feet, and is to be run straight, with no sharp bends.
Hmmm. So a run of roughly 75 feet with five 90-degree bends doesn't quite work. (Plus I still didn't want that black wire strung around the exterior of the house.) So I went to Lowe's, bought a ground rod and a bunch of #6 copper wire, drove the ground rod into the ground directly beneath where the dish would be mounted, ran #6 copper up to the eave, and then ran a length of #6 copper underground to the back of the house, through the basement, out the front, and connected it to the house grounding conductor system. Then I called the satellite company and told them they could send their installers back. Two guys showed up, in two trucks. These guys spoke English. I showed them where the dish had to go, explained that the ground was already in place and all they had to do was connect it, and they were ecstatic. It was a Friday afternoon and they were from out of state. They had been expecting to get home late that day. As it was, they had everything done and they were out of there within a half hour.
My point: Left to their own devices, the original crew would have put in an installation that was in complete violation of the NEC -- and, since they aren't required to be licensed electricians and the satellite companies aren't in any way licensed or regulated, if I hadn't started poking into it nobody would have been any the wiser. Unless a lightning strike caused a problem. And even then probably nobody would have figured out that the fire was caused by a non-compliant ground on the satellite dish. This state doesn't require permits for this work -- but it's regulated by the NEC, so we
should require permits, and there
should be some sort of license required for the wire stringers.
See NEC 820.100(A)(4) and (A)(5). Also 820.100(B), (C), and (D).
