VK4ZXI

Satellite tracking: hardware I have made progress since the first post. I now have the main hardware assembled and am in the process of wiring everything together. The original plan to use a pair of satellite dish positioner wasn't viable. Luckily I discovered that before my order for the second positioner was sent. It is possible to do it that way but there are two problems. First, the positioners are driven by diseqc control. The controller I had was for linear actuators and simply passed the diseqc controls from the satellite receiver through. So I would have needed two satellite receivers with diseqc control for a positioner. Not a big deal except... Second, all the amateur satellite controllers uses conventional rotators, with a 24 VAC motor and 500 Ohm potentiometer. A further consequence of this was that I couldn't use the terrestrial TV rotator as it used a pair of synchronous motors for turning and indicating. Neat system, but couldn't be used. So I had...

Satellite TV, RX and positioning Playing with satellites TV or radio is not too hard or expensive. I did a fair bit on it a few years ago (C and K band, ~4 GHz and ~12 GHz) and still have some of the gear. I could see my house in Brisbane on Google maps from the big white C band dish, ex Sky. It was a heavy fixed dish, jerry-rigged with a linear-actuator for position control.   A full new C (and usable on K) band system is around $400 on eBay.   Sometimes they are available for free, migrants and expats used them to get overseas TV. I had one, disassembled, but tossed it when we moved to Gold Coast. Should/may have kept pole, as big steel is expensive. All satellite TV use a LNB (low noise block) to receive and down convert to a standard IF range of about 1 to 2 GHz for a TV set-top box. The coax is used to carry control signals as tones (diseqc) or DC. The coax is very high performance, but cheap because of the massive use of it. The big dishes are controlled...