See Satellites in Broad Daylight with This Sky-Mapping Dish Antenna

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If you look up at the night sky in a dark enough place, with enough patience youā€™re almost sure to see a satellite cross the sky. Itā€™s pretty cool to think youā€™re watching light reflect off a hunk of metal zipping around the Earth fast enough to never hit it. Unfortunately, it doesnā€™t work during the daylight hours, and you really only get to see satellites in low orbits.

Thankfully, thereā€™s a trick that allows you to see satellites any time of day, even the ones in geosynchronous orbits ā€” you just need to look using microwaves. Thatā€™s what [Gabe] at [saveitforparts] did with a repurposed portable satellite dish, the kind that people who really donā€™t like being without their satellite TV programming when theyā€™re away from home buy and quickly sell when they realize that toting a satellite dish around is both expensive and embarrassing. They can be had for a song, and contain pretty much everything needed for satellite comms in one package: a small dish on a motorized altazimuth mount, a low-noise block amplifier (LNB), and a single-board computer that exposes a Linux shell.

After figuring out how to command the dish to specific coordinates and read the signal strength of the received transponder signals, [Gabe] was able to cobble together a Python program to automate the task. The data from these sweeps of the sky resulted in heat maps that showed a clear arc of geosynchronous satellites across the southern sky. Itā€™s quite similar to something that [Justin] from Thought Emporium did a while back, albeit in a much more compact and portable package. The video below has full details.

[Gabe] also tried turning the dish away from the satellites and seeing what his house looks like bathed in microwaves reflected from the satellite constellation, which worked surprisingly well ā€” well enough that weā€™ll be trawling the secondary market for one of these dishes; they look like a ton of fun.

Thanks again to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.



from Blog ā€“ Hackaday https://ift.tt/vXn9UZT

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