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Fun To Be Had With a 10-Foot Satellite Dish?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm moving to a rural community in the central United States. On the property is a satellite dish in excess of 3 meters in diameter that seems to still be in excellent condition. I already enjoy shortwave radio and was wondering what interesting TV feeds I might be able to catch with the dish. What kind of equipment would I need and how much should I expect to spend? If it's not useful for that purpose, what other fun projects might I use it for?"
There are loads of unencrypted satellite feeds. Whole communities of people who explore them can be discovered with a little Googling. They'll tell you what the best receivers are and how to set up a mechanism to swing the dish to different satellites. NASA TV comes to mind
You can get DVB listening equipment (or software) pretty easily. There are a lot of satellites out there that broadcast PBS for free, and other stuff. Program/broadcast listings are available variously on the interwebs.
Basically, you'll have a small receive suite, decide what you'd like to hunt, and calculate the azimuth/elevation for your lat/long/alt. I start by slewing with a sat meter (horizon) in the horizontal axis and locate the strongest point before sweeping vertically to the expected altitude. There's a lot of methods for accurate aiming. Google. There's a host of sat information on http://www.lyngsat.com/. It'll tell you things like the bird's location, what it carries, transponder types and configurations, etc.
I set up a small hughesnet based ISP in Afghanistan a few years ago with what most people would consider a horribly barebones set of gear (including a wifi mast crafted from a cable spool with a length of pipe stuck through it), and I can tell you that you can definitely get by with some fun and interesting signal grabbing with practically nothing. Rather than explain it with a poorly written slashdot comment, check out http://sattv.lounge0101.com/free_to_air_satellite.php for some basic info. Free-to-air stuff is just a fraction of what you can pick up.
There's also more interesting stuff out thee, with the correct equipment you'll discover amateur repeaters, very capturable simple data broadcasts, meteorological phenomena, and other cool junk. I believe there's even a radio station/repeater on the ISS. Failing satellite reception, it's still just a huge parabola which focuses on the feed horn. Replace the feed element with something from another band and voila. Of course, antenna optimization for something like this is a book in itself, but I imagine you could have reasonable dish utilization by throwing a 2.4Ghz-tuned biquad at the focus point and probably get about 20-30 dBi of additional gain.
If you live by the border, you can probably pick up the border patrol's predator drone feeds using the correct equipment/software. It's broadcast in plain-jane video most of the time, although since I doubt there's border agents down there with mobile terminals in this case, the area-wide broadcasts are probably disabled in favor of LOS. Might be able to pull it off though.
There are lots of feeds to find, if the dish has a motor.. You may need to get some different LNB;s the polorization of the antenna will determine what you can find... There are many many many lists available.. but for the most part, it will be lame... however, if you subscrive to Dish Network (or Bell ExpressVu if you are north of the border) and the mesh of the dish is less than 1/4" you can mount a Dish500 LNB on it and use it to get 100% signal from the Echostar (or nimiq) birds... even during a huge rainstorm or snowstorm
Those are called wildfeeds.
Better known as 318230.
Line with tinfoil. Hang a grill over the focal point. Point at sun.
Cook sun-dried beef jerky.
Get yourself good DVB-S2 receiver like PROF 7500 USB or PROF 7301 PCI or Azbox HD
from ebay or Ricks site http://www.gofastmotorsports.com/rickssatellitehome.htm
and check out all the HD feeds you can watch.
http://rickcaylor.websitetoolbox.com/
Satelliteguys is another good website but their wild feeds subforums is invitation only
http://www.satelliteguys.us/free-air-fta-discussion/
There's a number of people that have turned old TV antennas into radio telescopes.
Here's an example:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Poor-Man-s-Radio-Telescope/
For more just google "DIY radio antenna"
There's even online stores that sell everything you need:
http://www.radioastronomysupplies.com/radio_astronomy_supplies.php
It could be an interesting project.
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
Actually reflector size compared to wavelenght is very much relevant.
A shortwave radio signal with a wavelength of 64meters isn't going to be reflected very well by a 3m dish.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Look up "FTA Free to Air satellite "on google. start reading.
you will have to buy new feed-horns and I recommend also getting a decent HD FTA receiver. that can do both MPEG2 and MPEG4.
In about 1 month, you will have all the knowledge you need to find a crap-load of free TV. some strange, some normal, if you are into soccer then all the South america feeds will delight you as it seems there are about 987 channels of nothing but soccer... Oops sorry. Futbol!
the C band dish will allow you to watch some of the older stuff, but you can get a dual feed-horn to put both a C band and Ka band LNB on there to get all channels. add in a high end one that will do both polarization types and you expand your channel choices even further.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's aluminum. Take a six pack and some wrenches and take out your frustrations on it one afternoon. Then take it to the scrap yard and sell it. Aluminum has been going for $0.80 to $1.00 per pound the past year. Make sure it's "clean" with no ferrous metal still connected or you'll get maybe half that. While you're at it, take out the pipe it's set on and sell that too. Not much per pound, but lots of pounds. And then cover the hole over. And buy something nice with the money. And bring me some. You never take me anywhere anymore.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Protest HBO's rates by interfering with their signal!
$12.95/MONTH? NO WAY !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._MacDougall