Eight-foot dish becomes a tracking satellite ground station

Most people start with satellites by waving a handheld Yagi at a passing bird. A builder who goes by Cranktown City skipped that step. His first satellite station is an eight-foot dish he found online, mounted on a motorized base that tracks spacecraft across the sky. Hackaday featured the build this week.

The dish sits on a large post set in a concrete foundation, with a custom-fabricated metal base at the bottom. That base holds the receiving electronics and the positioning hardware. Azimuth comes from a big metal gear driven by a wheelchair motor. Elevation is handled by a linear actuator. Mounting the dish was a job of its own: it is not uniform in shape, so it can only go onto the frame in one specific orientation.

The finished station uses a circularly polarized feed and computer control to follow satellites. It is already downloading data from GOES weather satellites. The builder also added a wind sensor. When gusts pass a set speed, the system points the dish straight up to cut the wind load.

For most hams, a station like this is far more than the job requires. The amateur FM satellites and the ISS can be worked with a small handheld beam and a dual-band radio. Still, the mechanical problems here are the same ones anyone faces when moving up to az-el tracking for weather satellite reception, microwave satellites or EME: a solid foundation, a drive system that can handle the weight, and some plan for high winds. The builder also suggests the dish could eventually be used for radio astronomy.

If satellites are new to you, a pass prediction tool is the place to start. It shows when a satellite will be above your horizon and how high it will climb.