The sun is a valid and very interesting target for radio astronomy. A solar tracking mount would just work, no need for modification. The sun is also useful for finding your dish's focal point. Put strips of reflective aluminum tape across the dish, point it at the sun, and find the brightest focal point with your hand. The phase center (what you want to put at the focal point) of your helical is probably ~0.2 wavelengths away from the ground plane.
@@GLITCH_-.- NO! do this! there will be virtually no difference from radio to light, you dont even need the aluminum strips, the white surface will reflect enough to see the focal point. I've always thought when you have tried that dish that you have the focus point wrong, this is really good way to find out.
Oh come on, everyone knows the sun is just an elaborate hoax put on by the government... /s And no, the focal length of a parabola is not dependent on the wavelength. What is dependent is the gain - the higher the frequency, the larger the dish looks electrically (size of the dish considered in wavelengths of the signal)
Was gonna suggest this as well. Exactly as you said, uses the accelerometer and compass and points you right at the satellite. You can even see a map and it'll even tell you when future passes will be.
You probably want fewer turns on that helix. The gain of the feed needs to be "matched" to the F/D ratio of the dish. For a shallower dish (where the feed point is further from the dish) you want higher gain, and for a deeper dish, you want less gain (larger opening angle of the feed pattern). For a prime focus dish like you have, the formula to find the focal point is D*D / 16d. Where 'D' is the dish diameter, and 'd' is the depth. Just looking at the dish, I'd lop off a couple of turns on that helix. The "hazard" is that you under-illuminate the dish, and thus you're using much less of its reflector surface. So your nice 0.85m dish is actually operating more like a 0.5m dish, because you're only "illuminating" part of it.
Interesting! I'm still learning more antenna theory, right now I've just been copying what other folks have done online. I'll have to give that a shot :-)
For a dish with a "usual" F/D ratio of 0.35 to 0.42, your feed needs to have a gain between about 8dB and perhaps 10dB at most. There are online helical antenna calculators that show that 3 turns gives you about 9.5dB and about 60deg beam width.
Does it go both ways? If you over illuminate the dish, you pick up noise from the periphery of the dish and raise the noise floor. In that case you need to determine the precise beamwidth of your feed.
You don't have to be *that* precise, in practice. Rules-of-thumb can get you fairly far. In radio astronomy, the tendency is to *slightly* under-illuminate the dish to reduce, as you point out, spillover and ground-noise pickup. In other applications, you might want to maximize the forward gain, even if it means a bit of ground-noise.
Between now and the motorized mount, how about considering a tripod with a swivel head mount? That way you're not supporting the weight of the dish / antenna, and you're free to direct your personal motor energy to following the satellite path.
I know you are putting the old computer to use but I would get a usbc to usb a adapter and run sdr++ on Android and skip the computer all together, save weight, and use both stellarium and sdr++ on one device!
Great to see the progress on this. Have also been trying to catch the new meteor but work in progress. Looking forward to see the results of the iridium patch. And the stroopwafel cookie jar seems dutch, like me!
There's a trick in tying many-lead round-braids (turks head) that I think might help you here. First you get a sheet of paper as wide as the circumference of your tube, and as long as you want, set it out in front of you portrait style. Draw horizontal lines marking out the wavelength, and diagonal lines starting at one wavelength end and going to the opposite end of the next wavelength. Then draw 1 to 4~ vertical lines as appropriate for the size of tube. This is your drill guide, wrap it around the tube so the wavelength lines touch themselves and form rings. Drill holes anywhere the helix crosses a "vertical" (now lengthwise) line, and anywhere the helix crosses a wavelength line. Put firm fitting but removable nails in the holes and wrap against the pins. Simplification: Do most of that but instead of drilling holes, punch holes in the sheet and mark through them onto the tube. tip: Use tape to hold down the wire as you go. If you're willing, you could even do the markings method, and tape the wire down semi-permanently, with the tube becoming part of the antenna. Maybe add crosshairs to the tube and pretend you've made a radio-spyglass In round-braids, you lay out lines for every pass of the cord with phase offset wavelength lines, then notate all the overs and unders. The nails hold the cord where it will need to be for future passes, it gets really tough to keep everything arranged physically and mentally without an aid like this. If there's a vector graphics suite you're comfortable with, you should be able to make this pattern once and then scale it to whatever circumference and wavelength is appropriate.
I've known some ham operators to use a couple of television antenna rotors mounted at 90-degree right angles to each other, as satellite tracking drives.
The steel tube goin in the middle of the lhcp antenna is part of the problem as it has detuned it alot but use wood and not fibreglass rod say from a tent as its conductive
I grew up with one, and by pure coincidence my current house came with one. You’ll probably need to replace the catalytic combustor, as well as the fiberglass seal in the smoke box door, and the front door fiberglass seal. With the catalytic combustor functioning, you can squeeze a good night’s sleep out of an arm-load of larch.
A very interesting video, it's great that you succeeded in receiving the satellite. You could set up a small observatory, I'm very excited to see what the future holds.
Really interesting! Also want to mention that i find you and your channel brilliant. Please continue to be such a nice guy! I even start thinking about what i want to rig together when i move sometime next year. Greetings from Germany! ✌
some of older Asus EEEPCs had Intel Atom processor and there might be some specific Linux distribution for them. Some time ago I installed version of Debian for eeepc on my mini notebook, but now I am not certain if it has celeron or atom. But might be worth look in to that.
There isn't a lot of difference - they're both 32 bit x86 cores - most of the differences are just marketing, and how much cache they have, and what other hardware has been disabled (probably because it didn't pass self test). The only requirement is you need a distro that cross-compiles all the packages to i386 (32-bit) yet, and like you mentioned, debian is one such distro that stuff has the full package suite available for i386. But at the same time, just throw that piece of crap away, and pick up a used Thinkpad for $200 - problem solved, and it's better in every way.
My old workplace has a ton of old satellite dishes with NPRM's (I did remote telecommunications in the oil fields of Alberta and Saskatchewan). Since switching over to banded cellular for internet rather than satellite they no longer use them and are just taking up space in the shop. I really, really want to acquire one and muck about with this sort of stuff. It is so cool, thank you for sharing this with us. Also can we see a bit more of Donnie? Thank you.
I bet you could find some uses for those! I've messed around with a few different dishes and I keep meaning to set up some more permanent ones for various stuff. The cats have their own channel! www.youtube.com/@donnyfluff
Well, I'm learning right along with you. I am trying to get GEOS satellite images. Bought a Nooelec GEOS Dish and premium sawbird filter. I have many SDRs (RSPDuo, RTL-SDR V3 & V4, Kerberos & HackRF) but I can't seem to receive a signal so far. I've pointed the dish as instructed, several times, and at different satellites. I must be missing something! Obviously. Lol. I'll keep watching and learning as you go. I would love to have a dish pointer without paying thousands for it. So I'm interested in what you end up with! Thanks for the videos!
How's your skew? Might have to check dishpointer.com and see how many degrees to rotate the dish so the polarity aligns with the signal. If you've already got that, sorry for mentioning it, but it's something that threw me off for a while!
How are you measuring azimuth? If you're using a compass, are you correcting for the magnetic declination at your location? The best way to "blind" point an antenna is set the elevation to the correct angle (measure it with your phone, or even a protractor with a string with a weight hanging from the protractor), and then sweep the azimuth to find the signal.
I don't want to go home, I'm having to much fun😊. In the old days I would jackass a fabric fold up dish around (even on roofs) to show prospective customers A dish would work at there home. 😂 73 Leo
If you're just running a SDR would you be able to get away with something like a Pi Zero W 2? If you need x86 you can do one of the Lenovo 1 liter PCs off ebay. Lenovo has their slim tip to USB C adapter for those and you'd be able to run it off a portable battery. I don't think any of mine pull over 30 watts in average use and idle around 10 watts. I use those instead of Pis now and it's really easy to just SSH/remote desktop into them with a phone or tablet for control.
Every time you pick up something up I ask myself, "I wonder where he picked up that specialized piece of equipment." It turns out to be a cookie can lid... doh Great video.
Take a look at using two TV antenna rotors mounted with the first one in the 2nd 90 degrees from one another for azimuth and elevation then use the position sensor for the feed back of the position of the parabolic reflector with a Raspberry Pi to read the position sensor and to drive the rotors. I did something like that for a Yagi antenna years ago before we had the neat little position sensors and Raspberry PI's. I had to manually drive it by using two antenna rotor control boxes but it worked.
@@saveitforparts Yes the are, I look at them a few months ago and was SHOCKED at the PRICE. I have bought them that at Yard and Garage Sales and in 2nd hand stores for a song.
Use the no purpose tablet as a remote controller for the laptop using VNC/rdp/equivalent? It might look laggy on the tablet but as long as you can start & stop the capture and glance at the signal strengths as needed I would figure it would work
photography umbrellas aren't really parabolic - they're just parabolic-ish. They're just reflecting light in generally the right direction, not a super precise reflector. For RF, the surface accuracy of the reflector should be within 1/10 of a wavelength, so at 1.7GHZ, the parabola needs to be accurate to within ~18mm at all positions on the reflector. I very much doubt an umbrella is going to meet the spec
At the end of the video, I noticed that the noise is in the same place for each group of images. Presumably the the pictures are multiplexed in some way for the transmission downlink.
Yes, the satellite is like a line camera - it scans in one direction, and uses the motion of the satellite itself to scan the other direction (like an old school hand scanner). It collects all the data for each band / image at the same time and transmits it multiplexed together. They don't have any "store-and-forward" capability as far as I know.
I had some problems with low voltage devices like the raspberry pi, which caused under voltages with my sdrs. It made the signals weaker than on my laptop. That could have been happening on your cyberdeck tablet.
The power demand of SDR USB dongles can be an issue for laptops. My RTL SDR dongle for example draws about 160 milliamperes and was shortening the duration of operating sessions with my laptop. To solve this, I made a USB function-splitter Y adapter cable for my SDR dongle. The SDR data goes from the dongle through the adapter cable to the laptop per normal but all power for the SDR dongle is sourced from the other leg of the Y adapter which is plugged into a standard off-the-shelf USB power bank. For greater clarity, the leg of the adapter cable into which the SDR dongle is plugged has all four USB wires (data + & -, and DC power + & -), the leg that is plugged into the laptop has both USB data wires but no connection to the USB power wires, and the leg that is plugged into the power bank has both USB power wires but no connection to the data wires. The adapter cable works perfectly for me. One must of course take care to ensure correct polarity of connections when making the adapter cable.
Would an alt-az mount for astronomy purposes be useful for tracking? Some can be controlled via Stellarium. Not sure how the slew rates of such a mount would match that of satellite passes however. Good luck in your projects.
You might be able to fix SDR++ and SatDump not running on your CPU by compiling it from source, since then it will be compiled for your CPU's architecture
You should consider to use Servo Motors that are used for Scale model ships and airplanes. there are 50lbs servos with 180° travel out there (very cheap in china) that you can control with a arduino. They only require 5V, ground and a PWM signal. The other way is to control the servos with a RC remote in the 2.4Ghz band.
Great channel 😊keep it up. Only one observation is that you used black plastic parts in your aerial build, the black pigment may de-tune or absorb energy from your aerial. Try white parts instead.
@@saveitforparts Thx mate🤣 You know that you are the cause, for all of this🤣 My first HackRF+Portapack will arrive in a few days. I have saved a nice 5g flat antenna from scrapyard and a dish. I hope i don't immediately fry the amp🤣 Goal is to listen to the next moon mission, so i am not so reliant on what is live-streamed.
I really enjoy your videos and love the way you MacGyver stuff. I would like to suggest an Android based phone or tablet and an OTG cable for the RTL SDR for portable setups, which is what I do, it is janky but it works for me.
Do you have a video on designing antennas? If not i would love to see one! I am currently making a project using LoRa and i want to make a semidirectional antenna thats stationary and another onmidirectional antenna thats constantly moving but i cant find any good sources on how antennas are designed at a "for dummies" level.
I'm not really an antenna expert, I just crib other people's designs online and experiment to find what works. There are probably some much better theory resources out there! Heck, the little NanoVNA thing I've got will apparently do a lot more antenna analysis that I know how to do.
Might sound stupid lol, but a Steam deck I believe would work perfect as an up to date cyber deck. It already runs linux, battery operated, touch screen.. etc and can be had for pretty cheap with Valve's refurbished units. Or even a used Microsoft Surface tablet (which is what I use with my SDR dongle) would work great. Also, have you considered using an old school antenna rotor to move the dish to track the satellites? Admittedly, I'm not sure how that would work, but I know they can turn a full 360 degrees. Great video as always!
Could you use an old tv antenna rotor to move 360 degree movement and electric ram to move hozion to hozion movement, like a bucket on front end loader
You get used to the weight in a week or less if you keep using it, it happened the first time I got a SLR camera with a big lens, I couldn't keep the camera up and I believed I was some kind of wimp
i just got my sdr usb device, do you have a video of how to set up sdr++? i can't even figure out how to get static or radio channels or even get into the other bands of frequencies
Are you on Windows or Linux or Mac? Some of the SDRs like the RTL Blog v4 need a new driver, others will work with a generic driver. Sometimes you have to select the right device in the upper left and then mess with the gain and whatnot.
@@saveitforparts windows 10, i have the v3 and i had to use a usb driver installer, all i can lusten too right now is just fm radio, just need to figure out how to do other stuff now
You should be able to hear other stuff with a simple antenna, even just a wire out the window or old TV rabbit ears. Check out radioreference.com to see what's in your area.
@@saveitforparts i feel stupid, i figured it out, i thought for some reason my max was 99 mhz but did not know there were up and down buttons on the numbers, i thought the only way to change it was moving the slider along the band you could see and that was it, but i figured it out after messing around
Not yet, someone offered me an older dish but I haven't figured out what I'd do with it yet. I can see their beacons on KU band but can't do much with that.
It is time just to build a Jay Dosher style cyber deck and using a pi or x86 hardware with sdr os (dragon OS). It would be a perfect for all your outside radio/sattelite needs.
I'm betting the Atom in that tablet can't keep up recording the samples to disk in real-time, and that's why your recordings failed. It might not even be able to read from the SDR in real time -- you can verify that by running "rtl_test" at a command line. Also, some types of old flash storage can have really low write speeds -- possibly lower than the ~2 MB/s you're reading from the SDR. A USB flash drive might be faster than the internal flash, but the extra USB bandwidth might make the SDR sad during writes.
Your tablet/cyberdeck thingy is so cool, I'd love one those hehe. Too bad its hardware is rather obsolete, which other distros did you try to put on it other than Mint?
I just troll through surplus auctions a lot, I've never actually seen one before or since! You could try eBay or Google search for online auction companies near you and see what they carry.
Long distance like that is a challenge, you might be better off looking for other scanners in the area you want, who stream to radioreference / broadcastify. www.broadcastify.com/listen/
I'm not sure! For the US there's radio-locator.com/ or the FCC's maps www.fcc.gov/media/radio/am-and-fm-single-frequency-maps, but those might not be exactly what you want.
Satellite hams often use 2 rotors and a program called ham radio deluxe - try looking at that. Seems ham radio operators have solved some of those problems for you. Now, I have a question for you. I see you have lots of dishes… do you happen to have a 1.2 meter offset dish laying around? I’m needing one… are you near tennessee? I’ve got cash lol - I can buy one but shipping has now gone above the cost of the dish
I haven't had the $ for two rotors, all my stuff is dumpster dived or traded! Also no offset dishes at the moment, I think I even gave my DirecTV dish to a scrapper since it wasn't useful for anything. Sorry!
The intel Atom processors are largely just like any other x86 processor, just made for very low power on the order of 1-10 watts depending on model. I think the problem you're having has more to do with the early Atom's being 32 bit only, and most of the world has largely abandoned 32 bit over the last 10 years. The later 64 bit atoms are great, and I still have two of them that'll easily run modern Linux distributions. Too bad yours is 32 bit only. It's certainly possible that you might be able to re-compile your software as a 32 bit app.
Hey, almost forgot about it! I'm interested but don't know how I'd get it, where I'd put it, or what I'd do with it! I guess don't hold onto it just for me, if you can find someone else to take it. I don't get up your way very often and when I do it's usually in a carpool full of people and camping gear with no room for big treasures 😢
The sun is a valid and very interesting target for radio astronomy. A solar tracking mount would just work, no need for modification. The sun is also useful for finding your dish's focal point. Put strips of reflective aluminum tape across the dish, point it at the sun, and find the brightest focal point with your hand. The phase center (what you want to put at the focal point) of your helical is probably ~0.2 wavelengths away from the ground plane.
Hm. Pretty sure the focal point is different for radiowaves compared to light. Just like it is for red and blue light. Right? no?
@@GLITCH_-.- NO! do this! there will be virtually no difference from radio to light, you dont even need the aluminum strips, the white surface will reflect enough to see the focal point. I've always thought when you have tried that dish that you have the focus point wrong, this is really good way to find out.
@@bazzaar1869 Are you sure? Well, it will at the very least give you the position within a couple centimeters... If I'm right.
Oh come on, everyone knows the sun is just an elaborate hoax put on by the government... /s And no, the focal length of a parabola is not dependent on the wavelength. What is dependent is the gain - the higher the frequency, the larger the dish looks electrically (size of the dish considered in wavelengths of the signal)
“Hey honey, the crazy neighbor’s pointing satellite dishes at the sky again.” 📡 🛰️
hello, police? yeah its the guy with the metal poles again, yeah this time hes talking to satellites.
Police, as long as he is not wearing a tinfoil hat , he's fix. Oh he is?..RUN
Hahah hey honey, I shrunk the kids again
Look4Sat is really good, it doesn't have AR but it does use the compass and inclinometer sensors to predict and track the satellite.
Was gonna suggest this as well. Exactly as you said, uses the accelerometer and compass and points you right at the satellite. You can even see a map and it'll even tell you when future passes will be.
Look4Sat is great! I like some of the other predictors because their style (like orbitron), but look4sat is really just the easiest
my man is going crazy with all dem satellite bits, keep it going!
You probably want fewer turns on that helix. The gain of the feed needs to be "matched" to the F/D ratio of the dish. For a shallower dish (where the feed point is further from the dish) you want higher gain, and for a deeper dish, you want less gain (larger opening angle of the feed pattern). For a prime focus dish like you have, the formula to find the focal point is D*D / 16d. Where 'D' is the dish diameter, and 'd' is the depth. Just looking at the dish, I'd lop off a couple of turns on that helix. The "hazard" is that you under-illuminate the dish, and thus you're using much less of its reflector surface. So your nice 0.85m dish is actually operating more like a 0.5m dish, because you're only "illuminating" part of it.
Interesting! I'm still learning more antenna theory, right now I've just been copying what other folks have done online. I'll have to give that a shot :-)
For a dish with a "usual" F/D ratio of 0.35 to 0.42, your feed needs to have a gain between about 8dB and perhaps 10dB at most. There are online helical antenna calculators that show that 3 turns gives you about 9.5dB and about 60deg beam width.
Does it go both ways? If you over illuminate the dish, you pick up noise from the periphery of the dish and raise the noise floor. In that case you need to determine the precise beamwidth of your feed.
You don't have to be *that* precise, in practice. Rules-of-thumb can get you fairly far. In radio astronomy, the tendency is to *slightly* under-illuminate the dish to reduce, as you point out, spillover and ground-noise pickup. In other applications, you might want to maximize the forward gain, even if it means a bit of ground-noise.
@@saveitforparts can you cover microwave transmission capture effect? Like what happened on the max headroom signal hijacking.
Between now and the motorized mount, how about considering a tripod with a swivel head mount? That way you're not supporting the weight of the dish / antenna, and you're free to direct your personal motor energy to following the satellite path.
I know you are putting the old computer to use but I would get a usbc to usb a adapter and run sdr++ on Android and skip the computer all together, save weight, and use both stellarium and sdr++ on one device!
That's probably a better idea! I might have to do that next!
@@saveitforparts yay I contributed more than beer!
Thrift stores are great for more organizers. The sewing and makeup ones work great too.
Great to see the progress on this. Have also been trying to catch the new meteor but work in progress. Looking forward to see the results of the iridium patch. And the stroopwafel cookie jar seems dutch, like me!
You can always fashion a harness that you can wear. Much easier to hold that when the weight is evenly distributed
There's a trick in tying many-lead round-braids (turks head) that I think might help you here. First you get a sheet of paper as wide as the circumference of your tube, and as long as you want, set it out in front of you portrait style. Draw horizontal lines marking out the wavelength, and diagonal lines starting at one wavelength end and going to the opposite end of the next wavelength. Then draw 1 to 4~ vertical lines as appropriate for the size of tube. This is your drill guide, wrap it around the tube so the wavelength lines touch themselves and form rings. Drill holes anywhere the helix crosses a "vertical" (now lengthwise) line, and anywhere the helix crosses a wavelength line. Put firm fitting but removable nails in the holes and wrap against the pins.
Simplification: Do most of that but instead of drilling holes, punch holes in the sheet and mark through them onto the tube.
tip: Use tape to hold down the wire as you go.
If you're willing, you could even do the markings method, and tape the wire down semi-permanently, with the tube becoming part of the antenna.
Maybe add crosshairs to the tube and pretend you've made a radio-spyglass
In round-braids, you lay out lines for every pass of the cord with phase offset wavelength lines, then notate all the overs and unders. The nails hold the cord where it will need to be for future passes, it gets really tough to keep everything arranged physically and mentally without an aid like this.
If there's a vector graphics suite you're comfortable with, you should be able to make this pattern once and then scale it to whatever circumference and wavelength is appropriate.
Interesting! I'll have to look into that one.
I don't have a clue about the technology you're using, but it's fascinating stuff!
I've known some ham operators to use a couple of television antenna rotors mounted at 90-degree right angles to each other, as satellite tracking drives.
Apparently I need to find some cheap ones!
The steel tube goin in the middle of the lhcp antenna is part of the problem as it has detuned it alot but use wood and not fibreglass rod say from a tent as its conductive
Very nice Blaze King stove! I bought a farm and found a rusted but complete one recently.
I grew up with one, and by pure coincidence my current house came with one. You’ll probably need to replace the catalytic combustor, as well as the fiberglass seal in the smoke box door, and the front door fiberglass seal. With the catalytic combustor functioning, you can squeeze a good night’s sleep out of an arm-load of larch.
I've never clicked Like so fast in my life. Thank you for all you do
I'll be interested to see how you make out with the sun tracker for dishes.
A very interesting video, it's great that you succeeded in receiving the satellite. You could set up a small observatory, I'm very excited to see what the future holds.
Really interesting! Also want to mention that i find you and your channel brilliant. Please continue to be such a nice guy! I even start thinking about what i want to rig together when i move sometime next year. Greetings from Germany! ✌
You can use a linear polarized antenna to pick up a circular polarized antenna.
Very entertaining and informative. Thank you sir.
you're a bloody legend mater, keep it up
Hmmmm.... PVC + Arduino (or Raspberry Pi) + a couple of stepper motors < $100 bucks. Absolutely love your videos......
some of older Asus EEEPCs had Intel Atom processor and there might be some specific Linux distribution for them. Some time ago I installed version of Debian for eeepc on my mini notebook, but now I am not certain if it has celeron or atom. But might be worth look in to that.
There isn't a lot of difference - they're both 32 bit x86 cores - most of the differences are just marketing, and how much cache they have, and what other hardware has been disabled (probably because it didn't pass self test). The only requirement is you need a distro that cross-compiles all the packages to i386 (32-bit) yet, and like you mentioned, debian is one such distro that stuff has the full package suite available for i386. But at the same time, just throw that piece of crap away, and pick up a used Thinkpad for $200 - problem solved, and it's better in every way.
My old workplace has a ton of old satellite dishes with NPRM's (I did remote telecommunications in the oil fields of Alberta and Saskatchewan). Since switching over to banded cellular for internet rather than satellite they no longer use them and are just taking up space in the shop. I really, really want to acquire one and muck about with this sort of stuff. It is so cool, thank you for sharing this with us.
Also can we see a bit more of Donnie? Thank you.
I'm guessing you're a bit far away to get one to me here in the UK?! 🙂
I bet you could find some uses for those! I've messed around with a few different dishes and I keep meaning to set up some more permanent ones for various stuff.
The cats have their own channel! www.youtube.com/@donnyfluff
What sized dishes were they using? 1.2M? 1.8M? any 2.4M ones?
Well, I'm learning right along with you. I am trying to get GEOS satellite images. Bought a Nooelec GEOS Dish and premium sawbird filter. I have many SDRs (RSPDuo, RTL-SDR V3 & V4, Kerberos & HackRF) but I can't seem to receive a signal so far. I've pointed the dish as instructed, several times, and at different satellites. I must be missing something! Obviously. Lol.
I'll keep watching and learning as you go. I would love to have a dish pointer without paying thousands for it. So I'm interested in what you end up with!
Thanks for the videos!
How's your skew? Might have to check dishpointer.com and see how many degrees to rotate the dish so the polarity aligns with the signal. If you've already got that, sorry for mentioning it, but it's something that threw me off for a while!
@@saveitforparts I'll look at it. Probably my problem. Thanks
How are you measuring azimuth? If you're using a compass, are you correcting for the magnetic declination at your location? The best way to "blind" point an antenna is set the elevation to the correct angle (measure it with your phone, or even a protractor with a string with a weight hanging from the protractor), and then sweep the azimuth to find the signal.
I don't want to go home, I'm having to much fun😊. In the old days I would jackass a fabric fold up dish around (even on roofs) to show prospective customers A dish would work at there home. 😂 73 Leo
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here...
keep it up im wanting to do some weather satellites from here in Australia
If you're just running a SDR would you be able to get away with something like a Pi Zero W 2? If you need x86 you can do one of the Lenovo 1 liter PCs off ebay. Lenovo has their slim tip to USB C adapter for those and you'd be able to run it off a portable battery. I don't think any of mine pull over 30 watts in average use and idle around 10 watts. I use those instead of Pis now and it's really easy to just SSH/remote desktop into them with a phone or tablet for control.
8:09 Yeah officer, that guy is doing that RF yoga again...
Every time you pick up something up I ask myself, "I wonder where he picked up that specialized piece of equipment." It turns out to be a cookie can lid... doh Great video.
Surplus stores, garage sales, estate auctions... or sometimes just my recycling bin 😂
There's a long and distinguished history of using left over tins of everything from biscuits to sweets to coffee to baked beans for antenna projects!
I love your effort's from England
See, I told you those helical feeds work great!
15:39 LOL the problem of hoarding. I MEAN COLLECTING! 🤣🤣
As i remember helix feeds don't work the best with prime focus. People recommend patch antenna 1.7GHz feed design. If interested ill find the design
Oh no, seems like links in the comment section are disabled.. I'll try to "defang" the link to the design. sat[.]cc[.]ua[/]page3[.]html
Take a look at using two TV antenna rotors mounted with the first one in the 2nd 90 degrees from one another for azimuth and elevation then use the position sensor for the feed back of the position of the parabolic reflector with a Raspberry Pi to read the position sensor and to drive the rotors. I did something like that for a Yagi antenna years ago before we had the neat little position sensors and Raspberry PI's. I had to manually drive it by using two antenna rotor control boxes but it worked.
I'm hoping to try something like that, TV rotors are surprisingly expensive though!
@@saveitforparts Yes the are, I look at them a few months ago and was SHOCKED at the PRICE.
I have bought them that at Yard and Garage Sales and in 2nd hand stores for a song.
I'll keep an eye out :-)
Use the no purpose tablet as a remote controller for the laptop using VNC/rdp/equivalent? It might look laggy on the tablet but as long as you can start & stop the capture and glance at the signal strengths as needed I would figure it would work
Does that linux have a web browser? Maybe we could use ffmpeg as a wasm locally to process it. Local wasm ffmpeg in a browser works really well.
If you link and synchronize multiple satellite dishes together, that's like having one really big satellite dish.
I've tried that (ua-cam.com/video/dklYG70e7R0/v-deo.html) but had trouble getting them to sync properly.
@@saveitforparts aww man! You'll make it work eventually!
I have been wondering if it would be possible to spray a parabolic photography umbrella with conductive paint and use that as a dish.
I actually have a project like that coming up!
@@saveitforparts great looking forward to it, BTW you should get your ham radio liscence if you don't already have it :)
photography umbrellas aren't really parabolic - they're just parabolic-ish. They're just reflecting light in generally the right direction, not a super precise reflector. For RF, the surface accuracy of the reflector should be within 1/10 of a wavelength, so at 1.7GHZ, the parabola needs to be accurate to within ~18mm at all positions on the reflector. I very much doubt an umbrella is going to meet the spec
At the end of the video, I noticed that the noise is in the same place for each group of images. Presumably the the pictures are multiplexed in some way for the transmission downlink.
Yes, the satellite is like a line camera - it scans in one direction, and uses the motion of the satellite itself to scan the other direction (like an old school hand scanner). It collects all the data for each band / image at the same time and transmits it multiplexed together. They don't have any "store-and-forward" capability as far as I know.
Unless your foil tape has conductive glue, your reflector will not be as strong as you hope.
10:01 Or get (or build) one of those contraptions which is used to mount a dual aircraft gun to...
I had some problems with low voltage devices like the raspberry pi, which caused under voltages with my sdrs. It made the signals weaker than on my laptop. That could have been happening on your cyberdeck tablet.
The power demand of SDR USB dongles can be an issue for laptops. My RTL SDR dongle for example draws about 160 milliamperes and was shortening the duration of operating sessions with my laptop.
To solve this, I made a USB function-splitter Y adapter cable for my SDR dongle. The SDR data goes from the dongle through the adapter cable to the laptop per normal but all power for the SDR dongle is sourced from the other leg of the Y adapter which is plugged into a standard off-the-shelf USB power bank. For greater clarity, the leg of the adapter cable into which the SDR dongle is plugged has all four USB wires (data + & -, and DC power + & -), the leg that is plugged into the laptop has both USB data wires but no connection to the USB power wires, and the leg that is plugged into the power bank has both USB power wires but no connection to the data wires. The adapter cable works perfectly for me.
One must of course take care to ensure correct polarity of connections when making the adapter cable.
Would an alt-az mount for astronomy purposes be useful for tracking? Some can be controlled via Stellarium. Not sure how the slew rates of such a mount would match that of satellite passes however. Good luck in your projects.
I haven't found a good / cheap one yet, they're usually quite a bit of $$$
You might be able to fix SDR++ and SatDump not running on your CPU by compiling it from source, since then it will be compiled for your CPU's architecture
thank you. these videos are great. that cat is awesome btw.
I can picture a GI Joe character wearing a big-ass backpack with that dish coming out of it. Or maybe wearing it as a hat.
"I am not a very good satellite mount" should go on a t-shirt
5:02 Should work GREAT with a Dutch Stroopwafel assisted reflector...
You should consider to use Servo Motors that are used for Scale model ships and airplanes. there are 50lbs servos with 180° travel out there (very cheap in china) that you can control with a arduino. They only require 5V, ground and a PWM signal. The other way is to control the servos with a RC remote in the 2.4Ghz band.
Great channel 😊keep it up. Only one observation is that you used black plastic parts in your aerial build, the black pigment may de-tune or absorb energy from your aerial. Try white parts instead.
3:39 I have to consider the winding direction? 😩 ... Let's see where i can read about this.
I should have some links in the description, or sgcderek.github.io/tools/helix-calc.html is a good place to start.
@@saveitforparts Thx mate🤣 You know that you are the cause, for all of this🤣
My first HackRF+Portapack will arrive in a few days. I have saved a nice 5g flat antenna from scrapyard and a dish.
I hope i don't immediately fry the amp🤣 Goal is to listen to the next moon mission, so i am not so reliant on what is live-streamed.
I really enjoy your videos and love the way you MacGyver stuff. I would like to suggest an Android based phone or tablet and an OTG cable for the RTL SDR for portable setups, which is what I do, it is janky but it works for me.
I might have to try that, it would be lighter weight!
I use SDRTouch for the recordings and the SatDump apk. @@saveitforparts
Heavens Above would be a great app to try
Just a thought would a raspberry pi be a good !?
DCM, AKA dichloromethane or methylene chloride, is the perfect chemical to plastic weld that kind of cracking plastic.
Do you have a video on designing antennas? If not i would love to see one! I am currently making a project using LoRa and i want to make a semidirectional antenna thats stationary and another onmidirectional antenna thats constantly moving but i cant find any good sources on how antennas are designed at a "for dummies" level.
I'm not really an antenna expert, I just crib other people's designs online and experiment to find what works. There are probably some much better theory resources out there! Heck, the little NanoVNA thing I've got will apparently do a lot more antenna analysis that I know how to do.
Might sound stupid lol, but a Steam deck I believe would work perfect as an up to date cyber deck. It already runs linux, battery operated, touch screen.. etc and can be had for pretty cheap with Valve's refurbished units. Or even a used Microsoft Surface tablet (which is what I use with my SDR dongle) would work great.
Also, have you considered using an old school antenna rotor to move the dish to track the satellites? Admittedly, I'm not sure how that would work, but I know they can turn a full 360 degrees.
Great video as always!
I should try one of my Samsung tablets, or as someone mentioned, just a phone to run both Stellarium and SDR++
Could you use an old tv antenna rotor to move 360 degree movement and electric ram to move hozion to hozion movement, like a bucket on front end loader
That might work, I'll have to look for a TV rotor.
Satnog rotator should do the job here! 😊
ua-cam.com/video/lnRPEUPn61I/v-deo.htmlsi=hf4JV0HUrhAcQa1a
Might you be able to run satdump (et al) all on the phone?
Yeah, I could probably do everything on the phone instead of two devices.
@@saveitforpartsat least it could alleviate the weight of that garbagey cyberdeck boat anchor 🤣
i think in what you mignt be trying to do with the wx sat you should try a qfh antenna for 137mhz
I have that on the roof already, with the dish I'm trying to get ~1700mhz L-band from some of the same satellites.
For tracking satellites in AR with your phone you could try Star Walk 2. I assume the android version has satellites, the iOS version does.
Due to *_EPA_* requirements plastics breakdown and get brittle and crumble over time, I had a keyboard break on me just yesterday!!!
Maser cannon. We need a handheld maser cannon.
You need a RPi4 with Bookworm. It is 64 bit.
ISS Detector and pay for the full version. Its great :) Using it for Ham Radio.
Great video...👍
I use Satellite Tracker and Starwalk on iOS.
You get used to the weight in a week or less if you keep using it, it happened the first time I got a SLR camera with a big lens, I couldn't keep the camera up and I believed I was some kind of wimp
When I'm wearing my camera all day, it's my neck that hurts from the strap, not my arms. I must have really whimpy neck muscles
Doesn't the app Skeye track satellites?
Donnie is so cute ❤
It's not exactly AR, but heavens above is pretty good at real time tracking satellites.
What is the model of that black fold up satellite dish that you have? I can’t seem to find it anywhere?
It's a Cyberex CN7500, don't think they've been made for a while. I got it used from another local ham.
i just got my sdr usb device, do you have a video of how to set up sdr++? i can't even figure out how to get static or radio channels or even get into the other bands of frequencies
Are you on Windows or Linux or Mac? Some of the SDRs like the RTL Blog v4 need a new driver, others will work with a generic driver. Sometimes you have to select the right device in the upper left and then mess with the gain and whatnot.
@@saveitforparts windows 10, i have the v3 and i had to use a usb driver installer, all i can lusten too right now is just fm radio, just need to figure out how to do other stuff now
You should be able to hear other stuff with a simple antenna, even just a wire out the window or old TV rabbit ears. Check out radioreference.com to see what's in your area.
@@saveitforparts i feel stupid, i figured it out, i thought for some reason my max was 99 mhz but did not know there were up and down buttons on the numbers, i thought the only way to change it was moving the slider along the band you could see and that was it, but i figured it out after messing around
Dude, a monopod might make holding the dish up easier!
Odd. I have little to no interest in satellites or associated signals but it's interesting watching you mess with it.
how did you make the dish to be used with the long range wireless networking?
Not sure what you mean? Someone gave me the dish and I just hacked some different parts onto it.
@@saveitforparts Oh okay. I have an old dish or direct tv satellite and i want to make it into a long range wifi or wireless networking antenna.
Still though you got some great images. At least if that tablet dies, there's a bunch of awesome Samsung 35E 18650 cells in it.
Can you really get GOES from the PCB yagi?
Yep, with a good reflector... and even with a bad reflector, as I'll be showing on Wednesday!
@@saveitforparts Amazing timing, I've been trying to learn how to do it, can't wait to see what you come up with!
have you had a chance to tap into starlink sats?
Not yet, someone offered me an older dish but I haven't figured out what I'd do with it yet. I can see their beacons on KU band but can't do much with that.
It is time just to build a Jay Dosher style cyber deck and using a pi or x86 hardware with sdr os (dragon OS). It would be a perfect for all your outside radio/sattelite needs.
I'm betting the Atom in that tablet can't keep up recording the samples to disk in real-time, and that's why your recordings failed. It might not even be able to read from the SDR in real time -- you can verify that by running "rtl_test" at a command line. Also, some types of old flash storage can have really low write speeds -- possibly lower than the ~2 MB/s you're reading from the SDR. A USB flash drive might be faster than the internal flash, but the extra USB bandwidth might make the SDR sad during writes.
Is there a cat intro video!?
Your tablet/cyberdeck thingy is so cool, I'd love one those hehe. Too bad its hardware is rather obsolete, which other distros did you try to put on it other than Mint?
I can't remember exactly, I tried a couple of the ham radio ones like AHRL and HamOS, and I think Lubuntu.
Hey, how can I find a tablet like your tablet?
I just troll through surplus auctions a lot, I've never actually seen one before or since! You could try eBay or Google search for online auction companies near you and see what they carry.
@@saveitforparts Okay sir thanks for your reply
I just want to know how to MacGyver a antenna for my Police Scanner so I can pick up police communications for 100miles
Long distance like that is a challenge, you might be better off looking for other scanners in the area you want, who stream to radioreference / broadcastify. www.broadcastify.com/listen/
Do you know an app for am towers locating?
I'm not sure! For the US there's radio-locator.com/ or the FCC's maps www.fcc.gov/media/radio/am-and-fm-single-frequency-maps, but those might not be exactly what you want.
@@saveitforparts thank you man
Have you tried the app heavens above?
I can't remember if I tried that one, but none of the free ones I found would do what I wanted.
Satellite hams often use 2 rotors and a program called ham radio deluxe - try looking at that. Seems ham radio operators have solved some of those problems for you. Now, I have a question for you. I see you have lots of dishes… do you happen to have a 1.2 meter offset dish laying around? I’m needing one… are you near tennessee? I’ve got cash lol - I can buy one but shipping has now gone above the cost of the dish
I haven't had the $ for two rotors, all my stuff is dumpster dived or traded! Also no offset dishes at the moment, I think I even gave my DirecTV dish to a scrapper since it wasn't useful for anything. Sorry!
Can you use DISEQ?
I don't have a rotor that will handle that.
@@saveitforparts understood.
diseq only works in one axis, and it'd be rather clutzy to use it for a generic tracking mount.
3D print the struts laying flat not vertical, then they will bend and not break.
thanks😎😎
The intel Atom processors are largely just like any other x86 processor, just made for very low power on the order of 1-10 watts depending on model.
I think the problem you're having has more to do with the early Atom's being 32 bit only, and most of the world has largely abandoned 32 bit over the last 10 years. The later 64 bit atoms are great, and I still have two of them that'll easily run modern Linux distributions. Too bad yours is 32 bit only.
It's certainly possible that you might be able to re-compile your software as a 32 bit app.
Yeah, there's not a lot of 32-bit stuff left, as I've found with this!
any surface tablet would be a good satellite tracker device :3
I feel like you'd be better off with a Pi or LattePanda based system than trying to screw with that weird 32-bit Atom thing.
And the like goes to the sleeping cat)))
were you still interested in my siren, gabriel? fall colors are in full bloom up here:)
Hey, almost forgot about it! I'm interested but don't know how I'd get it, where I'd put it, or what I'd do with it! I guess don't hold onto it just for me, if you can find someone else to take it. I don't get up your way very often and when I do it's usually in a carpool full of people and camping gear with no room for big treasures 😢
Neato!