Reusing Old Satellite Dishes?

nlaporte asks: "My neighbor just threw out his old Primestar satellite dish and receiver. Thinking that I might be able to use it, I picked them up. As Primestar is defunct (aquired by DirecTV), I was wondering if anyone knew how (or knew of a Web site that told how) to reuse the old dish and/or reciever for receiving other satellite broadcasts, i.e. NASA TV or Voice of America, etc. What about using it for another pay satellite service? Is this dish I picked up worth keeping, or should I chuck it?" I hope there will be more uses for the glut of satellite dishes that have popped up all over America and the rest of the world...otherwise garbage dumps are going to get real interesting over the next few years.

Comments

Great for snacking

[Johnboy]

Fill it with salsa, some giant corn chips...

SETI really at home?

[XenonOfArcticus]

If you could get a few dozen of these out in a nice open field, and track them all the same (need a decent multi-axis rotator device) wouldn't this parallel array perform like a single large dish? (Same principle the VLA uses to make a bunch of big dishes work like one really massive dish). You could perform radio astronomy or SETI projects yourself at home. Probably need to upgrade the feedhorn/LNBA to something capable of tuning frequencies other than sat TV.

USes for a dish

[luckykaa]

1. A stir fry dish
2. A hat
3. a frisbee
4. a very small boat for a very smooth sea
5. Turn it into a steel drum

Re:Excellent Planters

[Tony Shepps]

That's no good. Your strawberries will be the first to pick up all the instructions from the aliens. (They may be organic, but little do the masses understand that man-made chemicals cause those instructions to be blotted out entirely -- in effect saving most of us from the raging hordes of death that will reign over much of the earth in the upcoming years.)

Furthermore, you have unwittingly given the strawberries a bully pulpit into the sky. By allowing them to send *their* messages out -- typically extremely simple messages, as far as we know -- many cultures out there are going to think that berries are the dominant earth culture. And when other berry cultures visit us, and see products like "Boo-Berry" and "Crunchberries", they'll be quite justified in wiping out all non-berry organisms on the planet.

Isn't it bad enough that we broadcast Tony Danza TV movies? Think of the consequences of your actions!
--

links

[titus-g]

Unless It's analogue rather than digital satellite then I'd imagine with a bit of tinkering then there must be something you could do with it, plenty of free to air channels out there...

I thought I had some bookmarks on DIY sattelite stuff, but either a) I didn't or b) I just can't see them among the hundreds of othere.

So instead have a satellite links page, among the billions of links here there should be a site to suit:

http://members.tripod.com/~eld orado2000/catalog.html

Primestar receiver useless

[Fooster]

But the Dish lives on. See this page at The Echostar Knowledge Base for drawings and photos that will show you how to convert that old Primestar Dish to one which receives DirecTV or Dish Network with much more gain (thus much less rain and snow fade).

SETI at home (really)

[Mark Hood]

DIY Search for ET Intelligence.
http://www.setileague.org/

Hundreds of people are doing this already! They're already finding weird things they can't explain (usually secret satellites, planes and so on) with just a dish, some relatively cheap electronics and an old PC & sound card.
Imagine the kudos the next time someone starts boasting about how many blocks they do in a day... "Well, I've just been focusing on the waterhole frequencies in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri..."