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.

“Hey honey, the crazy neighbor’s pointing satellite dishes at the sky 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.

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.

my man is going crazy with all dem satellite bits, keep it going!

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!

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.

Thrift stores are great for more organizers. The sewing and makeup ones work great too.

You can always fashion a harness that you can wear. Much easier to hold that when the weight is evenly distributed

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!

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

8:09 Yeah officer, that guy is doing that RF yoga again...

I don't have a clue about the technology you're using, but it's fascinating stuff!

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! ✌

Very entertaining and informative. Thank you sir.

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'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.

you're a bloody legend mater, keep it up

15:39 LOL the problem of hoarding. I MEAN COLLECTING! 🤣🤣

I've never clicked Like so fast in my life. Thank you for all you do

Hmmmm.... PVC + Arduino (or Raspberry Pi) + a couple of stepper motors < $100 bucks. Absolutely love your videos......

Very nice Blaze King stove! I bought a farm and found a rusted but complete one recently.

keep it up im wanting to do some weather satellites from here in Australia

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.

I love your effort's from England

See, I told you those helical feeds work great!

"I am not a very good satellite mount" should go on a t-shirt

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!

Unless your foil tape has conductive glue, your reflector will not be as strong as you hope.

If you link and synchronize multiple satellite dishes together, that's like having one really big satellite dish.

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

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

It's not exactly AR, but heavens above is pretty good at real time tracking satellites.

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

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.

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.

thank you. these videos are great. that cat is awesome btw.

You can use a linear polarized antenna to pick up a circular polarized antenna.

Heavens Above would be a great app to try

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!

Satnog rotator should do the job here! 😊

Maser cannon. We need a handheld maser cannon.

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.

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.

Donnie is so cute ❤

DCM, AKA dichloromethane or methylene chloride, is the perfect chemical to plastic weld that kind of cracking plastic.

Odd. I have little to no interest in satellites or associated signals but it's interesting watching you mess with it.

Great video...👍

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.

10:01 Or get (or build) one of those contraptions which is used to mount a dual aircraft gun to...

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'll be interested to see how you make out with the sun tracker for dishes.

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.

And the like goes to the sleeping cat)))

5:02 Should work GREAT with a Dutch Stroopwafel assisted reflector...

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

ISS Detector and pay for the full version. Its great :) Using it for Ham Radio.

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.

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.

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.

Neato!

You need a RPi4 with Bookworm. It is 64 bit.

Dude, a monopod might make holding the dish up easier!

Nice

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.

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.

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

I use Satellite Tracker and Starwalk on iOS.

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.

Time to contact them aliens

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.

thanks😎😎

any surface tablet would be a good satellite tracker device :3

imagine his neighbours are paranoid schizophrenics haha

3D print the struts laying flat not vertical, then they will bend and not break.

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 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.

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?

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

Hah, well done.

Donnie is not a laptop. Donnie is a cat-top. Please braid your goatee as a pirate would. Carry on. arrrrgh.

You are giniyes `````````````❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

TRY A CAMERA TRIPOD SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO HOLD IT.😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁

If you were to hang the dish above your head with a rope you would not have to hold it and it would be easier to aim.

were you still interested in my siren, gabriel? fall colors are in full bloom up here:)

i think in what you mignt be trying to do with the wx sat you should try a qfh antenna for 137mhz

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 hate math" says the CS Graduate

You need to be a NPC for the Dish

Due to *_EPA_* requirements plastics breakdown and get brittle and crumble over time, I had a keyboard break on me just yesterday!!!

Is there a cat intro video!?

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.

Just a thought would a raspberry pi be a good !?

I just want to know how to MacGyver a antenna for my Police Scanner so I can pick up police communications for 100miles

Derek doesn't allow talking about you in his server ( he is jealous because you got quite a lot of interesting satellite stuff like unfoldable C band dish 🤪 ) while you are here printing his scaffold. Derek pls don't unfunny role me because of this

I got goes tools on windows

Orbitrack is pretty good. $5 I think

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