You’re a true soulmate. Unfinished projects and tinkerin with pretty much useless stuff. But you always learn something along the way! Wish we had Axman or similar in Finland.
That's pretty cool. Using Linux on an old laptop is clever. It would we really great if you could pick up any of the lunar orbiters because they are finding all sorts of oddities on the moon.
Back in the late 60s - early 70s, there was a lot of amateur interest in diy satellite monitoring. One guy had a chicken wire antenna and was even monitoring military satellites. It was posted in an article in one of those mags, popular mechanics or mechanics illustrated, something like that, it was so long ago. Maybe some sleuth type can find the article for us and we can read what that guy did? Exciting stuff you are doing. I am looking forward to see what comes of this.
@Wilson Declan: Now, why would you do that? If she is your gf, then I suspect she will not be for long. If you do not trust her, then why are you with her? And you think that if you catch her cheating that you are any better committing a crime?
Wow, I just watched your video getting an image from the Meteor satellite and it reminded me that I want to try making my own radio telescope. Imagine my surprise when I click on what looks like the best video and I see your excited face again!
I know this video is a couple of years old, but you look at an arcade stick for the PTZ control as it is simply 4 buttons, so your current setup could easily be swapped, and you'd have a cool joystick to use. You also get quick-release versions to pop off if need be.
Awesome collection of the PTZ camera controllers. I'll have to keep in mind for similar use. Been working on my Dobsonian Mount design for my dishes since thinking will be better balanced for faster sweep rates since I'm planning use more for RDF, tracking and mapping. Thanks for sharing, subscribed!
If you still have the same phone from two years ago, my phone likes to delete pictures and video and the solution was an app called Open camera. It's ad free and it appears in the "select application" menu for photo uploads. It also has a shit ton of settings which might help with the framerate issue.
At Ku-band, the only discrete objects you'll be able to "see" with your setup are the Sun, and possibly the Moon. However, you could put a "can" feed on for the 21cm hydrogen line (1420.405MHz) and using a SawBird+ H1 LNA get hydrogen emissions from along the Milky Way. The 21cm hydrogen line is fairly "bright", so even a small dish allows you to detect those emissions in many parts of the sky. But at Ku-band (11-12GHz), you'd need a much larger dish, which means much more stringent pointing requirements, etc.
Nice finds!! I just traded some old HAM equipment for a spotting scope with a SkyWatcher AZ-Gti and am diving into using that for satellite tracking for radio. Seems promising, unfortunately I need a windows machine to run most of the software. Trying hard to do it in Linux if I can.
I haven't tried that yet, I saw a few radio channels on various satellites but nothing un-encrypted. This dish is a little too small for KU-band radio channels.
How do you even begin learning how to do what you do? This genuinely intrigues me and I'd love to have the knowledge to successfully tinker with the parts I have laying around
Thank you for sharing. I had the chance to view a rocket launch in 2018. Incredible experience. I uploaded a pretty cool montage of the trip to my page.
Make something that scans for uap,s plz 🙏🤣.and is it possible to make something that could look for satellites we don't know about around the moon ? Thx 👍
This spring I'd like to experiment with radio telescopes & I have a question. The LNB is a low noise block downconverter. I always assumed down converting ment converting the signal, say at 2Ghz to a lower frequency say 1 Ghz that is then fed to the receiver. So, if my assumption is valid and the satellite is published as sending data at ??? Ghz then how do you know where in, say SDRuno, to look for the satellite's signal? On the other hand a published receive signal could be the frequency a typical LNB converts the actual transmitted signal to? Being totally a newbie, I can only guess at the moment.
The LNB has a "local oscillator" (LO) frequency which is what you subtract from the original signal. So if it's a Ku Band signal at 12ghz, and the LO is say, 10.75ghz, the receiver will see the signal at 1,250Mhz. Different regions use different frequencies and LOs, so a "universal" TV LNB from Europe might be more flexible than a US model.
The round one I tried for FTA TV was just some cheap-o imported eBay thing, no brand since it's one of those overseas manufacturers that changes their name every 5 minutes to avoid import restrictions and/or bad reviews. When I was doing radio astronomy I think I just used the stock LNB that came with the dumpster dived dish.
I'm not sure about the modern digital TV antennas, I've honestly never used one! If the frequencies are similar then I would think it would be possible.
Any ideas on how to do something like this to get better phone and data signals for my home in a rural area? I purchased a parabolic antenna but mounting and aiming is a nightmare.
A satellite dish might not work for cell phones, it depends on the frequency range your carrier uses. When we lived in Alaska we had to put a directional antenna up on a pole and aim it at the nearest cell tower. Websites like this one will tell you where the towers are and what elevation to aim your antenna: www.scadacore.com/tools/rf-path/cell-tower-map-united-states/
Hey, We are planning to do the same, but are facing issue in connecting the batteries and also powering the lnb through it. Please guide us and if possible provide an email on which we can extend this conversation.
Sure, you can email me at gabe (at) saveitforparts.com. I just hooked two 9V batteries in series to get 18v, and then hooked it to a coax connector. There are also in-line power supplies or power injectors you can get online that do the same thing.
The USB device is a Software Defined Radio (SDR), the one in this video was a super cheap one from eBay (RTL2832). I'm not actually sure what the antenna connector on that is called, I had some old Wifi antenna parts that happened to fit. A better one (but slightly more expensive) is the RTL-SDR Blog V3. That's what I'm using now, it has a more standard antenna connector called SMA that's easier to find connectors for.
It's a Vicon Micropan, I think the V3000 model? It only holds up to 15lbs, the dish was about 14 so kind of pushing it for weight. It takes 24 volts AC, each direction uses a different wire plus a common ground. I just used this since it was lying around in the junk pile at work.
@@saveitforparts I looked around for one online and they are $200-$400! This is a nice solution but I think I will have to wait to see if I can find one cheaper.
I haven't tried it on Windows, I'm sure there are some programs for that. I found a lot of helpful info on Reddit on the rtlsdr and amateursatellite sections.
I'm not sure, it's just some DirectTV thing that either came with the dish or was in the $1 bin at Axman surplus. I don't think it has any model numbers on the outside. I did later buy a universal LNB on eBay that works better for some of the free channels.
Aw, this is cool. The first PTZ mount you took apart looks very similar inside to the one that moved my college's 1.5m NOAA satellite receiver dish! Too bad yours couldn't be salvaged!
Just picked up an AVL Technologies model 960K 0.96M VSAT uplink for $12.50 and there's a mate to it up for auction now too. Curious if you've played around with anything like this? KE6GHS / PG000233223
