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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."
Bird Baths...
Satellite dishes make excellent directional 802.11 antennas.
Just remove the existing LNB from the dish and replace it with a homemade antenna, like a biquad, tuned for your band-of-interest (i.e. 2.4GHz ISM for wi-fi). Make sure you get a powerful (high RX sensitivity & high TX power) wireless card with an external antenna jack
Here is one project write-up, though I'm sure there are many others:
http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/15/how-to-build-a-wifi-biquad-dish-antenna/
Alternatively, keep the LNB, get a DVB capture card (PCI models go for $20-$80+ new), and use the dish to get FTA (free to air) satellite TV.
There are many communities for this kind of thing exactly, just search google for: FTA forum
I'd also take apart that digital receiver and reverse engineer the hardware as much as I could, just for kicks.
When you've gotten your hour of fun out of it, gut it for parts and move on to the next interesting project.
What about using it or reselling it as a massive point to point wireless antenna?
1. Attach to tin foil hat
2. Read other people's minds.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Maybe you could use it to create some sort of device that would beam correct spellings into /. submissions?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
you could use the dish to setup a amateur radio astronomy listening post.
Nothing quite like a giant pudding bowl?
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.
or cover it with tinfoil to run a sterling engine??
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.
Strap on a chain, paint it gold and wear it around your neck Flava Flav style
...and go sledding!
I just found a new sig.
Loud sex.
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.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Yes there 'r'. :)
Go over to lyngsat.com and see what you can see. Satellite TV is far more than what the media companies are willing to sell you.
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
Either grow a massive hedge in an orb shape and stick this dish in the top section just like the DeathStar from StarWars or just do the same thing (sans hedge) with paper mache.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
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!
well i overheard a neighbor talking to a friend about how he had harvested a whole bunch of BUDs from his backyard. He just said he was planning on smoking them; I'm not sure what that means but good luck with your search.
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
Get a C band LNB and point to the next C band sat that is out there.
Plenty of C band channels out there. A good list is here.
http://www.lyngsat.com/america.html
Obviously, nobody's thought of its best alternative use yet: Teach mice to skateboard and open a whisker circus!
Paint it black, make a giant white-gloved hand reaching out of the ground and tell the neighborhood kids you buried Mickey Mouse in your backyard...fun for the whole family.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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
I say combine two ideas: bird bath and solar death ray.
Yum, BBQ!
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
You could also:
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
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)
Many people have used woks etc as Wifi dishes. Now turn the tables. Use the dish as a huge wok and go for the stir fry world record.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
C-Band is still in fairly active use in the US and around the world -- you could (gasp!) use it for what it was built for. It's the only way to get truly ala carte TV service, and usually costs a lot less than the alternatives (not to mention all of the free stuff out there). You'd probably need a new receiver to get digital channels, but I've spoken with plenty of MythTV users who have C-band setups.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
lol, I misread that as burglars, I think a home defence deathray would be a great idea.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Some lads with a couple of your dishes cracked 125 miles during the 2005 Defcon Wi-fi distance shoot out. With your one dish on one end, and even the weakest built-in wifi antenna on the other, you can still create a solid network connection to the next County. If the other antenna is a run of the mill 15 or 24 dB directional wifi, you can really crank.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Set up a WiFi link to the moon.
-R
It's parabolic, so if you can drag it inside, make it into an elliptical reflector dish.
Hmm... maybe I could use one to boost my AT&T cell reception...
Life is short: void the warranty.
Lower the dish so its pointing directly at your neighbours house.
When they enquire about it; Tell them you can now read their email.
Refuse to elaborate.
My shrink's neighbour has a dish pointed at the shrinks office. He says the paranoid delusionals love it. I love it too. Total coincidence.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
From your link to wikipedia:
Although a single cable is limited to 5 meters, the USB specification permits up to five USB hubs in a long chain of cables and hubs. Consequently the maximum possible signalling distance is 30 meters, using six 5-meter cables and five hubs. In actual use, the last hub is a more convenient endpoint since some USB devices include built-in cables intended to directly connect to a hub, setting the maximum useful signalling distance at 25 meters.
Also note that the maximum length of 5m is due to the standard allowing for a cable delay of less than 5.2 ns. This means that a 5m cable will be under the 26 ns allowed delay. If a cable introduces less delay then it would be possible to use a longer cable.
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.
I wrote about think kind of thing briefly in my journal a while back: http://slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/189083
You've already got most everything you need... For the cost of a DVB-S receiver ($40 for a PCI model, $100 for a set-top-box), you can get quite a few free TV channels, in addition to raw feeds and other eccentric stuff. No monthly fees required. That doesn't include most "cable" channels, but much more than you'll get with an antenna.
Alternatively, if your dish was already fitted with a Ku-band LNBF, you could simply aim it at the DirecTV sat, and get a VERY strong signal, eliminating drop-outs even in the even of airplane flyovers, or extremely heavy rain fade.
But I would suggest throwing out the DirecTV subscription, and going with the big-ugly-dish you already own, and a 4DTV receiver. It's easily the cheapest way to get subscription channels, probably less than 1/4rd the price of DirecTV or DishNet. Ala carte subscriptions are a big advantage that could save you dramatically.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
The curved dishes make decent ponds for birds to splash in. Cover the edges with rocks or something else decorative to hide what it really is.
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.
You could fall asleep in it and broadcast your dreams all over the world.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
It's /., not ./!
Your ad here.
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.
It's not hard.
No sig today...
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.
The one in my neighbor's back yard is made of solid sheet steel, weighs a ton and is about 8 feet in diameter. You could stir-fry enough Chinese food in it to feed the whole neighborhood. Hmmm, might be a good way to get rid of all those pesky feral cats roaming the neighborhood too.
Satellite dishes make excellent directional 802.11 antennas.
Just remove the existing LNB from the dish and replace it with a homemade antenna, like a biquad, tuned for your band-of-interest (i.e. 2.4GHz ISM for wi-fi). Make sure you get a powerful (high RX sensitivity & high TX power) wireless card with an external antenna jack
Me looking at access log and seeing wireless hack attempts... Looks at old C band dish and old microwave oven.. Hmm let's scan for the intruder and see if that laptop likes a KW of focused power in the WiFi band!
The truth shall set you free!
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.
you can't use a BUD C-band for Ku-band reception
True for a C band LNB, but assuming you have a dual (C and Ku) band LNB the problem then is not resonance, it's selectivity. Most C band dishes have a fine enough mesh to reflect Ku band signals, but at Ku frequencies BUDs are not always directional enough to keep signals from adjacent satellites from interfering. You'll still get most of the Ku channels, but every once in a while you'll find one that you know you should be able to receive but can't. I had this problem with ktwo. I knew it was there, Lyngsat told me so, but I just couldn't pick it up until I installed a dedicated Ku band dish.
A 36-inch Ku-band dish will get anything you need
I agree - if you're in the continental US and don't have anything getting in the way like tree branches, a 36 inch dish is all you need for Ku.
You can absolutely use a c-band reflector with a ku feed. The focus is the same regardless of the lamba (wavelength in meters [or lambda] is 300/freq in megahertz.) You'll see that the reflector (dish) is multiple lamba and non-resonant for either c (4ghz down 6 up) or ku (11ghz down, 14 up) so moving to a higher band effectively increases the size of the reflector, but the reflector is not a resonant peice, and a grid dip meter will show that. ... hydrogen absorption limits the trend in actually using anything past ka...
Wrongo!
The only difference between c-band and ku-band dishes is in the feed-horn. because KU band is a much higher frequency, the aperture is much smaller, and thus a different sizing WG fitting is required to mate with the LNB. Of course, there is always the issue of polarity as well, linear and circular polarized feeds have different setups.
The dish itself is just a big surface area to collect signal and bounce it into the middle. You can get c band ku band l band, and pretty much all microwave frequencies (hence the polularity for ISM hack-jobs)
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
We had some old woks and we did a similar thing?: drill a hole in the base, fill with soil and gravel and plant alpines - the result a very nice wokkery.
He was likely bluffing. DirectTV uses NDS Videoguard, which AFAIK to this day remains unbroken. There are other networks out there that can be broken, and many of them require buying a "Common-Interface" card (basically a PCI-PCMCIA adapter) and a decrytion module.
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!
Maybe you'll be able to watch tv during rainstorms.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
There is nothing "resonant" about a parabolic dish, the diameter determines potential gain and the shape is a function of the focal point. Gain increases as the wavelength becomes shorter in relation to the dish, so most dishes are more effective at Ku than C, which is why smaller Ku dishes provide similar gain figures to the old C band dishes. A common problem is that the mesh of the older BUDs is not tight enough to be reflective at shorter wavelengths, but most were dual-band C/Ku toward the end. Another design constraint is the "illumination" angle of the feed horn, in other words, the amount of the dish the feed can "see". Dish surface outside the illumination angle of the feed is useless, which is why we don't see very shallow dishes with the feedpoint very close.. these would require a feed with a wide illumination angle. The reason you don't go with the largest dish possible, besides space limitations, is that increased gain narrows the beam width of the antenna, which means it must be pointed with more accuracy. A small dish might provide sufficient gain when pointed within 10 degrees of the source, a huge dish might be a fraction of a degree. An 8ft dish used for Ku would be hard to point, but would provide phenomenal gain, probably more than most Ku band LNBs are being designed for these days, and I'd imagine it would overload if you couldn't turn down the gain of the amplifier. If you are providing more signal than your amplifier can handle, you've got either too much antenna or too much amplifier.
Load it onto the back of a truck, head into the mountains, and recreate the shield-sled scene from Willow.
Coat it with aluminum, polish it, and attach a powerful lamp in place of the reciever.
aim it at your neighbors and fire it up.
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
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!
I spend less than $100 USD per year and get 4,000 channels off my BUD. Some are digital stations others are analog -- just like cable and other satellite technologies. There also HD options for BUD but I don't have the hardware for that. I am happy with the local HD programing I get from rabbit ears.
Put a speaker or microphone in the focus, hang a bed sheet over it so no one can see what it is. Then whisper instructions to the crazy people down on the street. Play music only they can hear.
Or point it at the neighbors house and listen in.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Use it for observing the radiation emitted by passing communication satellites, particularly in th 4-8Ghz range.
My father-in-law pointed his straight up and drilled a hole in it so water would drain. He filled it with soil, and now grows water melons in it. I love seeing him get the step later out to pick water melons.
Just be careful with that microwave oven. Those magnetrons can be dangerous.
Thanks for posting the warning. My post was humor. I used to repair the ovens in the electronics shop, so I am aware, however the causal reader of Slashdot should heed the warning. They typically operate at about 4KV. If the HV doesn't get you right away, the effects from exposure to the radiation or dust from a smashed magnetron could produce lasting lingering health problems.
The truth shall set you free!