Can I Make A Satellite Dish From A Big Bowl? 

We're about 2 videos away from a paper-mache satellite dish. Keep it up Gabe!

We are cooking today

Every time I see a bowl like that, I think about that sledding scene in Christmas Vacation. Classic.

Decadesback we built ‘em out of those disk sleds that everyone broke arms & legs with on the snowy hills. Maybe one of those next, eh?

LOL "crimes against antenna theory" I love it!

"If I drill a hole in it, it wouldn't be a bowl any more." Correct. It would be a very slow colander.

Those bowls are normally spherical... remember Arecibo? You use a linear feed with a spherical section to approximate a parabola... and you can steer the feed around instead of pointing the dish! A set of cross-bars would probably have suspended the feed well and given you some focus adjustment. Linear antennas work fine for circular... you don't even have to spin them to peak the signal unlike linear-to-linear (satellites generally are not stabilized in rotation). You do lose a little dBs. Your focus calc is probably not good for spherical reflectors.

Maybe this is where I should start because - you need to WOK before you run. I'll be here all week.

Not every shape is suitable for a satellite dish, but as I walk through the hardware store, I always see things that could be used to build an antenna. A very interesting contribution that shows what not to do.

My first dish in the early 90's was a wok lid, worked pretty good really

I started my adventures in Radio with a WiFi dongle and a wok. This is my kinda thang. ❤

I have one of those metal kids saucer sleds I picked up from Scheels, as seen in the Christmas Vacation movie. I now have ideas...

the most convenient thing in a kitchen for antennaification ive used is a wire mesh ladle for deep frying. a couple of bucks from the asian supermarket. built one for a mate in high school who had a really bad wifi signal in his bedroom. cut a hole in the middle to poke a USB wifi dongle through, a usb extension cable, adjust the depth for best signal and apply hot glue. we 'mounted' it by stabbing the handle into a box and parking it on top of the closet. took the signal from 1 bar to 3 bars, which was enough to be useful. Our first attempt was a coke can cut up very similar to the candle reflector in one of your recent videos shoved over the routers antenna. kinda worked a bit, but also tanked the wifi for the rest of the house, so that was a No-Go. Eventually found a long enough length of cat 5 to run around the outside of the house. pro tip, black poly irrigation pipe makes excellent outdoor stealth conduit. cheap and ubiquitous, lay it in the garden bed and nobody questions its right to be there. a much easier sell to the perentals/landlord than wanting to punch holes in the walls or roof. I wouldn't use it for mains and ends up a bit longer, but Cat 5 dont mind. Ive used it more recently in rentals with particularly difficult landlords and housemates who dont appreciate the aesthetic of cat5 winding around the loungeroom and hallways. no idea why...

Damn it, Gabe, I don't need to add a satellite comms project to my list of unfinished projects!!! Don't stop.

Woks have a shallow dish angle compared to a bowl. I wonder if it would work better? Just need to find a wok in the trash. 😅 Pretty cool to see you try a viewer suggestion, however ill-fated it may have been. Thanks!

Awesome experiment 👍 I wonder if you lined a swimming pool with foil or mesh how that would work?

Looking forward to the Save it For Sats/Save it for Salads channel :)

Now lets have you take one of the smaller RV based sat dishes and use it for a mixing bowl. Toss a big old salad in it with assorted edible (?) plants from Sandland.

3:49 is a broadband fat monopole. It'll have a null in the straight "up" direction and might have worked slightly better in a sideways orientation.

I love your attitude! It's infectious, now I look at junk/stuff or curb finds completely differently, it's now like...hmmm, what can I use that for, lol.

Let's be honest, this channel is already crimes against antenna theory, and that's probably like 1/3rd of the reason I watch it 🤣❤

I wonder if you could squash it a bit without destroying it's bowl-like properties. I am thinking a hydraulic press with some kind of force spreader. If anything tears along the outside rim you can patch it with HVAC tape.

That mixing bowl would make a good parabolic microphone i would love to see make one out of that bowl.😁😁😁😁

Reminds me of the giant cooking pot my grandmother used to cook in. Came with an equally huge pot lid. Looked and felt like it could double as Captain America's shield. Had a much more shallow-yet-gentle curve to it. Would have probably made for a great satellite dish.

Howdy from Texas. I absolutely love your channel and all of your experiments! Keep doing what you are doing.

i did something like this with a large stainless mixing bowl duct taped to a tripod with a usb wifi adapter zip tied to a free bamboo chopstick, it worked great for borrowing wifi from the neighbor across the street (with permission). the feed point/ best signal was almost at the brim for the adapter... it was a 12" diameter bowl

Wunderbar, you can prepare a delicious salad while checking the weather... and it's healthy too!...thx for the vid.

I've got some of those PCB antennas recently, having designed some patch antennas for my degree I wanted to check out what was out there already. Some are not bad, some shift in what frequency they are resonant at with very minor contact with other objects, thats high frequency antennas for you tho. The log periodic is the most reliable but that almost planer horn shaped antenna is quite sensitive to condition changes.

Try the neighbors metal trash can lid, if it dosent work you can put it back and it will hold a little more trash instead. 😂

Try putting the feed 2 to 4 multiples of the wave length that you are trying to receive from the estimated focal point. Back in the lat 1960's I mounted an 8 ohm speaker using all thread standoffs in front of a large bole like that and connected the speaker to the microphone input of an audio amplifier feeding headphones and I could hear two guys talking in a boat they were fishing in the Manatee river in Manatee County Florida, they were about a half of a mile from me and I could hear them very well. I was on the north side of the river in a small town called Palmetto Florida, yes it is the same town that the movie with Woody Harrelson was in was shot.

When you have a Chinese restaurant and Gabe keeps installing various sdr's on your woks and the sticks for antenna mast

This is such an exciting series! Looking forward to whst you come up with next 😄

Keep up the good work! Specially liked your write up in the AMSAT journal! Very interesting stuff!

Great video and great explanation as to why this common misconception fails.

very cool, i always enjoy learning from what you are doing.

Hmm, how about a metal mesh hung from a frame? Kinda like an umbrella, but the frame can be whatever you have available. Some bracing and shaping might be a good idea :P

I think you need low gain antenna like a simple dipole in the focus since the signal comes from all part of the dish in different angles. The log periodic antenna is probably way to focused and only uses a small part of the dish.

Cool idea.Thank you, keep working.

2:00 @Gabe, one thing you might want to look at is something called a Vivaldi antenna. They are a wide band circuit board antenna, and very interesting to work with, especially if you connect them to a SDR.

Using a right angle triangle C^2 = A^2 + B^2 you can calculate the radius of a curve.. Depth = C - A B = Diameter/2 C = ((Depth^2) + (B^2)) / (Depth x 2) Radius = C FocalPoint = Radius x 2 (or is that half)... This part I forget.. I used this formula to calculate the depth of reflector telescope mirrors.. If you are grinding your own..

It was worth a try. Fun video!

bro is making a sat dish out of just ANYTHING at this point

A plow disc might work. Heavy, but it should already have a hole in the middle.

I want the very first Crimes Against Antenna Theory tee shirt! I’ll take a large please.

I'm for crimes against antenna theory!

That bowl looks like a concave and convex metal-art of the moon. 🌑😳

Could you use light to find the focal point? for example put it in sunlight and see where it generates a focal point

i was literally just eyeballing a giant metal bowl i have and wondering what kind of gain it would get lol

You need to make a plasic jig to adjust your recievers position.

Well, I do see a BBQ cover with potential...... 3:21

That’s aviation weather data! (METARs and TAFs) I never knew they can be picked up by satellite.

I believe a kids round snow sled might work, but the fl might be 2 to 3 ft.lol 73 Leo

3:12 I highly recommend Nashua brand model 357. If you have a costco near you, Nashua has a model they sell at costco too which is just as good. 357 is hard to beat though. it STICKS. never had it fail me and i've tried every brand out there

I worked as a Temp at one of the Kitchens at Central Michigan University years ago and they did have huge 80 quart Stainless Steel mixing bowls they called "Satellite Bowls" for mixing huge amounts salads of some sort for the Cafeterias. LOL

I'm glad you tried a mixing bowl. BUT a wok that is wider and not as deep like the ones they use in Chinese fast food shops do work. i would love to see you try one of these woks. apparently some Chinese people have done it but because of china's strict internet i cant seam to find any video on it in china. i would really love it if you would try the large shallow wide wok.😁😁😁😁

I giggle snotted through the entirety of this video. Well done (:

If you smoke a big bowl, is it still an antenna? If you make the bowl into an antenna, and you fill it with jam, is it a jammer?

Try a wok. Some of them are much more parabolic-like

The science is in the trying, not suspecting the outcome before hand! :D

How about one of those large convex mirrors turned backwards?

Very fun project. I still count that as a partial success. Pretty sure it was just the size that limited its abilities. Maybe it would work for satt TV :).

So what about a more shallow and less spherical metal bowl? Or perhaps a tinfoil covered 3D printed sattelite dish.

"Next week on Save it for Parts - can we receive a signal from Russia's newest satellite with this taxidermied beaver"

*_"Crimes Against Antenna Theory"_* 😆😆😆

could polishing the bowl make it work better?

So fun!

I'm loving this series,,,will it satellite dish 😅😅

a wok is more parabolic, you should try it next

great experiments.keep it comin'

Crimes against antenna's? I don't know man, that kind of sounds more like a Law&Order spinoff. {DUN! DUN!}

Glad you saved me the trial.....

3:19 I think that you should have named the channel "willitdish?"

I made one much like this about ten years ago.

thanks for all the videos they are really interesting short or long :)

Please make some tasty Wok-Curry in a sattelite Dish

Hi again i was watching this video and i have been into satellite dishes since the late 1980s ,there's nothing wrong with a bowl as a satellite dish nothing also wrong with its shape at all ! the difference between a deep dish as in this bowl and a shallow dish is a deep dish is more directional and sees less of the sky so less noise really detected and they are very directional a shallow dish sort of what normal dishes are ( really they are in between design ! ) really shallow dishes the feed focal point is way above the dish and a deep dish its very close to the dish shallow dishes see a lot of sky so direct all that radio noise to the the focal point .With a deep dish design, the LNA and feedhorn are positioned at a level almost parallel with the rim of the antenna. The deep dish provides superior shielding for the feedhorn and LNA, rejecting more earth noise and terrestrial interference than a shallow antenna would. But because of the feed's close proximity to the surface of the antenna, it cannot view the entire surface as well as when a shallow parabolic design is used. Consequently, the deep dish will not provide as much gain as that produced by a shallow antenna of the same diameter but it did an amazing job detecting that geo sat you pointed it at for its size the focal point i would think is more critical as well ,did you try rotating the dish for polarization of the feed ? that is another factor can come into play ...Great job again with this video just a few things i wanted to point out learn some thing new every day i say ; 0 )

You cant get to space without duck tape and thats the reason why the soviets never landed a comrade on the moon😂

Hey what belt holster are you using? Been looking for a better way to store my leatherman and flashlight

We all wanted this and you know it

Nice try, anyway. Even if that bowl were parabolic (they're generally spherical), feeding it efficiently with such a low F/D would be a significant challenge--your feed would need to have very little forward gain. Add in the fact that it's spherical, and you have a real challenge turning it into a workable antenna.

It is a cool bowl.

Awesome !

would the bowl be better used for a transmit antenna to bounce your signal of a ham repeater satellite?

Is there anything you cant turn into an antenna?

What about using a barrel? When it is sitting on its flat base cutting in half vertically at less than the halfway point.

I love trying random new stuff. quick question, could I use my dads old LNA-200S and no I don't still have the antenna, i have used it for listening to police band on 470.538.500 from 56mi away on my roof ant and its worked well in the past? also what module where you using for 3:40 on sdr++

You should try a garbage can lid

do you think if i covered a saucer sled in foil it be a pretty good dish

Another enjoyable video. With the linearly polarized receiver, is there a chance that just rotating the bowl about the axis of the stick holding the receiver ("arm"?) would improve the signal pick up?

I was waiting for you to download a picture of a big salad.

Amazing

After the apocalypse, Gabe will rebuild civilization from a pile of trash.

Just shine a light in the bowl and see where it hits a centered stick....no need to do math 😉

Your a good teacher

Not sure if you’re a sewing guy, have you thought about inflatable reflectors? I remember seeing some inflatable C band fly packs on eBay years back.

What about a microwave antenna? Have a use for that?

This little feed of mine, I am going to let it shine.

Copper or Al on the bowl. Steel is not a very good reflector.

got an idea. did you try that 1.7GHz QFH antenna as feed? it should be omni, thus be more compatible with such f/D..

Try the blow for wifi ?