Like many of us, [Gabe] has things he just can’t stop buying. In his case, it is portable satellite dishes. You’ve seen these. They look like a dome or maybe a hard hat on some kind of motorized base. What’s in them? What can you do with them? Watch the video below and find out.
As [Gabe] points out, you can often find these on the surplus market for very little money. You can sometimes find them on the side of the road for free, too. Although we’ve never been that lucky.
The video shows three generations of Winegard antennas. It shows what’s inside and how to command them. Of course, the obvious use for these is as an antenna. But we also were thinking they’d make a fair motion base for something, too.
Some of the antennas lack any limit switches. On startup, the system spins until it grinds the plastic gears to find its travel limits. We expect that’s not good for the gears, but it does work. [Gabe] mentions it might be a bit of planned obsolescence, but we imagine it is more of a cost-saving measure.
Junkyards are a frequent source for satellite gear, apparently. Dishes have lots of other uses, too.
Pretty neat… I have used these but I haven’t seen a nice teardown of one before, I hadn’t really thought of it before now. Nice work
“satellite dish” 🙄 I still shudder by that term, even in my native language. It’s being used by non tech-savvy people all day. It’s a dish full of satellites, I suppose?
Back in the 90s, my family and me still called it “parabolic mirror”.
Some friends did it, too. The antenna itself was the LNC, the low-noise converter. Now we’re down to ‘sat dish’ level, culture wise. Sigh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_reflector
PS: A 35cm reflector can be good enough to receive QO-100. I’ve tried.
So maybe this portable antenna will do, too.
An acquaintance (ham) did transmit using a 45cm model, using a little helix mounted on the LNB.
He used a few watts, though. About 10W or so.
In my country it’s called a “satellite antenna”, “parabolic antenna” or just “parabola”.
“Dishes” are only for the meals and are actually flat.
Can’t imagine how difficult it must be to eat off of flat plates.
Parabolantenne was what we used to say at home, but Satellitenschüssel was equally fine (excuse my German). In the end, this discussion might go back to Bernstein’s language code theory and whether you could actually deduct elaborated and restricted code to social class. If you’re in for that …
Never stopped my friends and me from talking about computers, eating pizza and having a good time together.
Thank you for your reply. I didn’t mean to be snobby sounding, btw.
I do like simple and clear language, too. And I think that’s okay.
Even Einstein once said that people who can’t explain a matter in a childfriendly wording may haven’t really understood it.
It’s just.. I wished that social development would keep up with the technical development.
And using street language all time long might have an affect to the psyche.
The ability to abstract, to differenciate and to be precise is one of the good aspects of human mind.
Simplifying and generalizations may lead to a limited worldview.
You and the other person were both being snobby and pompous. And you do go on at length.
Satellite Dish is pretty common for everyday American English. It might be a generational thing because people used to only see them uncovered in the huge old C-band dishes in backyards. Microwave links were always covered.
“Satellite Dish is pretty common for everyday American English.”
I see, and I think it’s okay, as well. English simply is like that, I suppose. It tends to be more relaxed.
I just wished people with same native language as me wouldn’t adopt such things 1:1! 😅
But it’s not just satellite dish, we also used to say “mobile telephone” or “mobile radio telephone” in the early-mid 90s instead of “handy”..
Sure, the old term was very, um, bulky. But it also was precise.
The term “handy” by contrast was also used for CB radio and ham radio (2-way radio, walkie-talkie).
It wouldn’t be much of a problem, if the old term hadn’t been phased out of use because of the simplistic one.
Nowadays, in my language, people shrug their shoulders if you say “mobile telephone” . “Handy” or “smartphone” is all they’re used to now.
In English, you people still are saying “mobile” (short form for mobile phone) or “cellphone”.
And cellphone is still spot on, despite being short. It’s being referring to cellular phone technology.
Anyway, no big deal in principle, of course.
It’s just that such small things can slightly trigger people like me who grew up with the original technical terms when the technology was new.
Especially if the whole society around you seems to use language that becomes simpler and simpler with every year. Sigh. 😮💨
Silly me! I complained about old terms going out of use and forgot to mention the original one myself. The “auto telephone” (Autotelefon, Autotelephon). Aka the “car phone” in English, I think.
greetings from 16,000km away Malaysia 😊 here we refer cellphones as handphones 🤣
‘Satellite dish’ has been a term since way before the 90s. 1978 to be exact.
Yes, but private television in Europe started in the 1980s.
And the 90s saw a big boost in popularity for satellite TV.
It was in the 90s when ordinary citizens installed millions of “satellite dishes” on their roof.
But in contrast to today, the television programme and magazines were still very educational.
You had TV moderators and magazine writers telling you about technical terms and how things work.
And not just on a superficial level, merely.
They told you what an LNC (now LNB) is, how it works and which frequencies are being used and how bad weather was attenuating the signal.
I’m not sure if I can describe it properly here. To my understanding (web comments, Youtube), American TV is mostly “trash TV” and had been that way since the ~90s or so (era of cable TV?).
– I’m using this for comparison here, since its sort of has become of a (bad) role model for western TV. More and more of our TV stations adopt this format. Sigh.
Anyway, the TV programme we had here in Europe of the 90s was more similar to the American programme that had been around in the 1960s/1970s.
– More professional, more down to earth in short.
We had educational shows without any sensationalism or soap dramas.
The news speakers were calm and quiet, without any opinion.
It was up to the audience to think for itself and draw its own conclusions.
That being said, I don’t mean to judge or to criticize American TV here. That’s not the point.
It simply was a different world most of us had lived here over the big pond.
And at least in my country, the TV broadcasters had an educational mission.
That’s why documentaries and tech magazines on TV didn’t dumb down the information level too much.
In these “old” days, the audience had heard terms like “parabolic antenna” being mentioned in same sentence as “satellite dish”.
Like: “[..]Dear televisions viewers, this satellite dish you see here is an parabolic antenna for receiving satellite TV.
The main piece of inside this parabolic mirror is a so-called low-noise-converter – or LNC in short.
It down converts the received signal at 10 GHz down to 739Mhz, the so-called immediate frequency – also called IF.
10 GHz are about 10.000 MHz, my dear television viewers.
The lower frequency is being used due to it having less loss when being passed through thiner, more flexible cables [..]”
Again, I’m not good at explaining the experience.
On YouTube, there are many videos about TV programme from Europe of the 1980s/1990s that give an impression.
At least on TV, the world was much calmer and more thoughtful. It had more class. And this carried over in daily life and language too.
What you’re doing is the opposite of inspiring people to care about what you say.
And then there are people like me who take it to an even less technical level by tacking the word “thingy” to the end of everything. Satellite dish thingy. Circuit board thingy. Transformer thingy. Flux capacitor thingy. :)
“As [Gabe] points out, you can often find these on the surplus market for very little money. You can sometimes find them on the side of the road for free, too.”
Yeah a few years ago that was not a thing, but that’s common right now. Not on the side of the road perhaps, but they are scrapped in huge numbers.
We use the big boy marine versions and we are replacing them all. They will be scrapped. We ordered a huge amount of Starlink dishes as a replacement for our ships, after tests shown the improvements compared to the old systems we use. I don’t know the current rate but last I asked (2 years ago i think), normal satellite internet offshore was around 5 euro’s per megabyte. And we got a whole bunch of ships. Then we have the remote locations onshore that we use that often requires satellite internet as there isn’t any cellphone coverage. I heard that they expected to save a million euro’s a month by changing to Starlink. Incredibly impressive. It’s still satellite internet and not the blazing fast and low latency (30ms) Starlink home owners are used to. Latency is much higher when not near land, but at least it’s usable internet and a lot higher transfer rates than the previous setup.
So, let us know which dumpster/skip you’ll be putting those discarded dishes in!
B^)
othernet working?
The MILSATCOM radios on my cutter still had manual azimuth and elevation we had to dial in as we moved around the Pacific ocean. It gave our antenna a grid of sky to search in to “acquire the bird” so it wasn’t doing a full sky sweep. Once it locked on it would stay with the satellite until we moved too far for it to keep pointing at that defined grid. The real time saver though was our Motorola Equatorial Satellite Antenna Pointing Guide. Took a lot of guess work out of trying to line up on a geo-stat satellite while rolling along in the maritime equivalent of a bathtub toy.
Most annoying part was that we didn’t get an alarm when the signal dropped or we were about to leave the grid. Comms just cut out and we had to start the diagnosis process top to bottom. I got in the habit of checking our posn every 12 hours and making incremental changes as necessary.
The annoying part was our Fleet Broad Band (FBB) and KVH antennas didn’t need adjusting, they just did it on their own. I (very) briefly contemplated grabbing an old FBB rig and slapping the MILSATCOM antenna on it just to see if I could get it to work. Was told by my ET1 and OPS LT that was a rather large “no no”.
https://imgur.com/gallery/motorola-equatorial-satellite-antenna-pointing-guide-slide-rule-WGEBLrd
I was on the other end of this as a satcom controller. Our big ‘joke’ was that we’d tell people we’re gonna turn the beacon on so go ahead and look for the red light in the sky.
“On startup, the system spins until it grinds the plastic gears to find its travel limits”
This does not have to be harmful if:
a ) the gear train in question is backdrivable, so planetary and stacked spurs are ok options but worm gears are a on.
and
b ) you carefully monitor the motor current and detect the moment of stalling when the current gets far above anything seen during normal rotation but is still safely below the maximum rated current for the motor brushes (which for some motors is concerningly lower than the actual stall current).
It is not that rare for the principle of finding limits by looking for stalls to be used, in even in high quality high end equipment (it can be done for steppers too if you’ve a high res encoder and closed loop control which can reduce the current when less is needed).
RS-485 is a serial data protocol.