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Alternative Uses For an Old Satellite Dish?
ya really writes "My family has one of those BUDs (Big Ugly Dishes) sitting in their back yard still. The other day they asked me if I would take it apart for them. Aside from simply recycling it, I was wondering if there are any alternatives for its use. It was one of the last made before DirectTV and Dish took over satellite broadcasting, and even has a digital receiver. I'd say it was made around 1996."
What about using it or reselling it as a massive point to point wireless antenna?
you could use the dish to setup a amateur radio astronomy listening post.
This may be a bit redneck, but when I was a kid a friend had one. We took it down and used it as a big saucer sled to pull behind a truck in winter. It was great fun.
Since it's parabolic, you can can, with the addition of some reflectivity, use it to concentrate the powers of the sun, suitable for culinary and other low-heat chemistry.
...and go sledding!
I just found a new sig.
Just give it the Mythbusters treatment and make an "Archimedes Death Ray" (AKA, very-short-range-small-stuff-burner-but-only-on-very-sunny-days.)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I've always wanted to do EME - Earth Moon Earth with one. I want to use a 802.11 wifi card; but I have not the skill to program such a packet bounce. Hardware is the easy part.
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Some people in the physics dept here at uni, took an old parabolic dish and made a radio telescope with it. Big semester project.
Will still be a while making it though... I've been a year on an addition to the house and cleaning up the mess that the previous owner left.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Literally.
We had an old 8ft dish. My dad and I covered
the mounting holes with stainless mesh, filled
it with good soil and compost and planted a
nice selection of butterfly/hummingbird flowers
in it.
This kept certain plants from roaming beyond
the area desired. Use plants that trellis or
hang to cover the ugly sides/underside.
That oversized planter has been going for over
a decade now. The plants do a good job of
reseeding every year.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Mmm, true that. That was actually one of my favorite things about having one of those huge old dishes. We were able to capture some of our local news company's feeds. This included sports... so when they went to commercial we got to sit there while the camera man screwed around and zoomed in on girls in the crowd and the commentators drew garbage on the screen. Good times.
I began to build one a while back but held off because I didn't know enough DSP at the time...
:)
And I wanted to write the processing portion
http://www.signalone.com/radioastronomy/telescope/
http://www.radiosky.com/faq.html
http://www.mtmscientific.com/radiotelescope.html
http://www.radiotelescopebuilder.com/
One of these days, I'll put that 3 meter dish to use.
Turn it up-side-down and use it fror a roof over a porch swing
http://www.mountlehmanllamas.com/feeder-sat-dish.html
Cover it with aluminum foil and make a solar cooker
http://www.backyardnature.net/j/solardsh.htm
Cover it in mirrors and melt/combust an amazing verity of things
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish23.shtml
Giant Snow sled
Big Flower planter
Garage Sale Sign
Fish Pond
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
You can throw a mic in it and have people sing into it. It's a very interesting recording technique.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
My father and I took our 8foot sat dish, dug a huge hole in the ground, layered it with a thick rubber liner and made a fishpond with it. Sure sounds redneck when you explain it to someone, but I'll be damned if the final result wasn't pretty.
Yank out the transceiver, put in a heat exchanger in its place. Use sheets of 1/2 " peel and stick mirror tiles to cover the dish surface. Pick up a small 4 sided pyramid, put photocells on all 4 sides, and use a couple of differential op-amps to determine which side has the most light hitting it.
Use those two signals to run the motor controls to aim the dish. It will always point at the brightest spot in the sky. A small pump feeding fluid (such as connonseed oil) thru the heat exchanger, to a large thermal well( say a buried concrete container full of steel slugs), will gather all the heat you need. Use the secondary loop from the thermal well for your home heating, hot water, cooking. etc. (cottonseed oil will easily heat to 400F)
mount a microphone at its focal point and aim that sucker (carefully) at whatever you would like to hear.
I also second, third, or whatever the notion of a death ray,
take a microwave oven apart and get creative with the +10 ray of amana.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Check out this option: I made a two story treehouse out of recycled materials and included a fibreglass satellite dish as a dome roof. http://www.treehousebydesign.com/gallery_canim5.html Unexpected benefit is that the sounds from the forest floor are collected by the dish and focused right near my head while in bed. Sounds like critters are scurrying around the edge of the bed and water is lapping at my feet.
Hear, hear!
Also, keep in mind that if you have one of these dishes, the service providers offer ala carte for ALL the channels. I have had one of these for about 10 years, my monthly cable bill is about 20 a month because i pick what i want, and can select a single channel for a month!
Russ
I am want to work on a Solar concentrator that will spin a Sterling engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine which drives an electric generator. Just mount a Stirling engine to the focal point with a reflective surface http://www.sprol.com/?p=265 that concentrates the heat, and add a sun tracker system to it and you will have free electricity for life! Of course how much power you generate depends on the dish diameter, your geographical location, and the reflective surface you use. In any case a Stirling is more efficient that the current photovoltaic technology we have available today. I would be doing this now except I don't have the "reflective surface" and the required sun tracker hardware in place yet. My tiny little 6" lathe just won't spin a six foot disk no matter how hard I try, and nobody seems to be throwing these big dishes out when I am conveniently available.
Oh, you have to be kidding me. Someone should take away your Slashdot license. :)
What would a geek do with a big honkin' parabolic reflector? All kinds of things.
1) The most obvious, pick up old satellite signals. I'm pretty sure (but not positive) that the C and KU bands are still in use. I used to watch live feeds for various news stations, along with all kinds of weird broadcasting. It was my first exposure to local TV in other areas.
2) "Free to air". I won't say anything else about that, it's up to you to research.
3) Listen in on unencrypted government traffic. There was a news story about this a few years ago. Some folks in England were intercepting not-so-secret US Government recon flights over Eastern Europe. (If they were to be really secret, they would have been encrypted and on different satellites). Just because the antenna normally points on one arc, it doesn't mean that's the only things to listen to.
4) One heck of a 802.11b/g antenna. :) Watch out for the FCC though, that's a lot of gain. You may need to put a finer mesh screen over your existing panels. Check your wavelengths.
5) Parabolic reflector + big light source (sun) = quick fried lunch. Cover it in mylar, and don't look into it directly. Better yet, don't be in front of it. It's all natural, and doesn't hurt the environment much. :)
6) Parabolic reflector + microphone = really big parabolic microphone. Since you still have the mylar on from #5, all you have to do is mount the microphone. Well, you may want to use something less optically reflective, like saran wrap, unless you want to risk cooking your $5 microphone. :)
7) Parabolic reflector + Microwave oven magnetron = trouble. Your 802.11b/g transmitter may have been putting off 0.025W (0.200W if you bought a good card). What happens when you pump 700W+ into the dish? :) How about a dozen magnetrons aimed into a smaller dish at the focal point, to reflect back down into the main dish first? 8.4KW and the gain of your antenna. You could cook your dinner from a few miles away. Don't aim it at friends, enemies, or anything you don't want to mess up pretty quick.
8) Get another one the same size, cover them both in mylar, and have your own UFO parked in the back yard. Sell the pictures to the National Enquirer, and then sell the UFO on eBay with a signed copy of that edition.
and on to the boring options.
9) Scrap metal?
10) Pull the panels, and you'll have really big snow shoes.
11) Pull the panels for snow sled racing this winter.
12) Pull the panels, Cover the convex side with styrofoam and fiberglass, and make some totally rad knee boards.
Enjoy!
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Full size satellite dishes are still the best way to receive free television content, despite what the cable / pay satellite providers may imply in their advertising. If you don't have any place to put it yourself, it shouldn't be too difficult to find someone who would be willing to buy it.
After five years of dissatisfaction with Dish Network, my mother has asked my brother and me to get the big ugly dish that came with the house working. The "$0 for cable channels" thing is pretty enticing.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If it can work as a death ray then a more useful hack would be to heat water. it will be more fun if it has a motor as some of these did.
not sure how difficult it may be to control the dish with a computer so it always focuses sun to a point where u can have a metal container holding water.
Sorry, but I have to put a plug in here for my project. I am working at Eastern Michigan University on a project known as EARTHS or Education Astronomy using Radio Telescopes in High Schools. The goal of the project is to build small radio telescopes that can be put in the hands of high schools for students to learn with, while also being paired into a statewide array of telescope to form an experimental very long baseline array over the lower half of the state of Michigan. One idea to keep the costs of the project low was to use old satellite dishes, and we are looking for people that may be willing to donate their old dishes for our first prototype being built currently. If anyone is interested in doing so or would like more information on the project, I can be contacted at crazywhiteboy311 at gmail.com, just use the heading EARTHS in your email.
Depends. If it's a mesh dish, you may get much less reflection of higher frequency signals once the wavelength gets shorter than about twice the distance between bars in the mesh, IIRC. Probably not going to work too well for Ku band because the wavelength gets below 2 cm, so you'd need a mesh spacing of less than about .8 or .9 cm... I think.... If it is a solid dish, it should just work; a parabola is a parabola. Even still, it might work, but you won't get nearly the amount of extra reflection you'd ordinarily get from using such a large dish.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
We have in Chile this thing called "asado al disco" (Dish barbecue). It's like a spanish paella dish but without rice, just some veggies and lots of meat and sausages... and the "disco" usually is made out of... you know
The geek's way to BBQ. Period
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11654406@N00/442904516/in/set-72157594427048139/
What does a parabolical dish do? It concentrates parallel radiation (a.k.a. radio waves) into the focal point of the dish -- that's where your sat receiver typically resides.
:-)
... well, wherever you choose to point it at :-)
Why not the other way round: replace the sat receiver by some wave *emitter* -- the the wave generator from an old microwave oven comes to mind
And point that emitter to radiate towards the dish. The dish will then reflect the radiation coming from the dot-like emitter sitting at the focal point nicely into parallel waves going out *from* the dish to
Pigeons on your neighbour's roof come to mind spontaneously...
Just try not to fry the electronics of passing by planes on clear days, will you... 'd be gainst the law!
That's what I have here at home. My BUD is pointed to AMC-4 at 101W longitude. I have a International Datacasting SRA-2100 data receiver connected to a Linux box and that Linux box runs software from Noaaport.net. I get NEXRAD radar data, satellite imagery, weather watches and warnings, and all the computer models. All raw and mostly unprocessed.
Make a gazebo with the inverted dish. Example:
http://www.ranum.com/fun/projects/gazebo/index.html
A C-Band dish with a digital receiver has access to more programming, a better signal and lower prices for programming than anything Dish or Direct offer. It even gets HDTV! I have been using one for 8 years, and wouldn'y trade for the little dish product on a bet! Use it as intended!! Much better!