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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.
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!?"
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.
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
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 could also:
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
LMAO! Yeah.... I know.
The Joke {----------------
------------
The HUGE space in between
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Your Head {---------------
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.
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.