Hacking Portable Satellite Dish For More Space Experiments
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- This was a project to modify a Winegard Carryout satellite antenna into a microwave imager and miniature radio telescope. It's similar to my prior project with a Dish Tailgater antenna ( • Seeing Satellites with... )
I used a string of serial cable adapters to get a console on the Carryout dish brain, then I could control it with a Python program. The dish moves through a specified angle and elevation range and takes a signal reading at each position. These can be combined into an image of the sky where each pixel is a radio signal. Then you can "see" things like satellites and radiation patterns.
The prior version only used the onboard Ku-band receiver on the dish. This version replaces the LNB with an RTL-SDR (Software-defined radio) and L-band antenna. Other radio bands could be used, but microwave probably works the best.
I'd like to turn this into a Wifi imager eventually. I did some brief experiments with Wifi (S-band) using a downconverter, but I didn't get very far with that.
My best images so far include an Inmarsat geostationary satellite, navigation satellites, and Iridium comm satellites. All of these can be "imaged" with the dish, although they appear a little different due to the relative speed of the dish and the satellite! For example, Iridium showed up as one long streak (kind of like a time exposure picture). GPS / Gallileo / Beidou showed up as many small points on an orbital track. Inmarsat showed up as fixed a point source in the sky.
I have a writeup on my website with more information about this project here: saveitforparts...
My code is available on Github here: github.com/sav...
You will need an RS-232 to RS-485 adapter. I used this one:
www.amazon.com...
Used satellite antennas like this often show up on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and other used sites. They're worth about $25-$50USD. Sometimes people ask more, but I just wait until they go unsold for a month and the price drops, or wait for someone else to list one cheaper.
Saveitforparts t-shirts and other merch at saveitforparts...
Join this channel to get access to perks:
/ @saveitforparts
Or support me via Patreon at / saveitforparts
Check out gadgets and devices I like at www.amazon.com...
"Just one more satelite dish bros... I promise its the last one. Just one more. One more satelite dish.. just one more. I only need one more.."
I mean the more you have, the higher resolution for “The Very Small Array”, no?
@@ericlotze7724 Just one more satelite dish...
@@ericlotze7724 "Just one more dish..."
I don't have the slightest clue what you are doing, but i really enjoy watching you do whatever it is your doing.
Me to 😊
Exactly! I pretty much “get it” but watch, mostly, for the pure perseverance of it. The tech is fun, but the problem-solving, with the “no worries, see what happens, stick-to-it-ivness” is great.
🤣🤣🤣
We love recreational python coding
I turned a robot head on mars with python
🐍
Strangely was able to download gear files from limewire 😂❤❤❤🥹
Remember that that movie where the guy wanted to come back to earth from mars
And he came across a Russia ship with a bear 🐻 in the program 😂
The way it spoke
And the American put python on it I think ? It was a great movie
Yes I moved a robot 🤖 head on mars with python 🐍
RUclips commands helped 😆
me too.. literally
He’s got a lot more patience than I do. He keeps saying this annoying problem, that annoying problem, yet shows not a hint of annoyance. I would have already been throwing things around, getting mad, cussing. Kudos to you sir!
The panic of plugging in a serial port into a moving assembly is... fun :) Another phenomenal video!
HAL usually refers to the Hardware Abstraction Layer... but hey... the HAL9000 has the utmost enthusiasm for the mission, so that works too!
Hal was a reference to IBM, just one letter up in the alphabet. H-I, A-B, L-M.
you called
@@Azazeal777 nice!
I don't understand half of what he's doing but it's the professionaly winging it that has me hooked.
Also: what was the cencored.png?👀
Ha, it's an overlay for editing, in case I have something too dumb or sketchy. Mostly a joke, I forget when I last used it.
Easily one of the coolest channels I've ever come across. I love the scripting too.
❤me too. Awesome channel!
I like the filming of the screen, it fits the vibe of the channel better lol
I think it's as simple as the whole waveguide is just the wrong size for L-band.
Fascinating experiment, mate. Thanks for the great content.
Amazing work for a backyard enthusiast! Love watching your projects develop. Love from NZ
You could use a rotary encoder to show the exact position of the dish and use that as error correction.
Hey.. I have a challenge could you be having a solution to it and help me out. I want to learn how to hack pay tv and watch channels free of charge
@@4muhammedsiraaji71 Most modern satellite tv is encrypted and most people don't have that kind of tech or skill to be able to crack it.
@@4muhammedsiraaji71if it was back in the 90s, that'd be easy, but it's 2024 unfortunately and doing that is all but impossible, unless you are using one of the very precious few remaining analog coax services.
Sorry buddy, ever since DTV / DISH went digital, they have encoded their transmissions, and all the boxes are designed to take sat encryption updates. The good old days of paying a DTV technician under the table for a decoder are gone. Besides the'res nothing good on TV anyway. @@4muhammedsiraaji71
@@4muhammedsiraaji71skull
Don't give up, this is one of the most interesting things I've seen in a while!
Great how you back engineered it. Loved the "Cat Scanner" Your Cat loves helping you out all of the time.
there is a gigantic base of people that love breaking down this low level especially satellite stuff. we can donate things to you. or at least i can.
What kinda stuff? I'm looking to donate a couple broken VuQube dishes to someone myself, just to free up garage space 😅
@@saveitforparts is there a discord or something we can share info?
I'd love to get my hands on one of these that I can hack up! I might need to source locally though.
@@kb9mtd-aaronwebb if in USA u can have some
I haven't had time to sign up for Discord, too distracted with all the other chat apps! Email is probably the easiest, gabe (at) saveitforparts (dot com).
Hands down one of my favourite channels.
14:40 - I’d suggest marking the hard limits and from those, find the midpoint. Then use that midpoint for your initial aim.
Really interesting project, always useful to have a real world problem to get your teeth into. Good to see your code too, gives an idea of how you’re moving the dish. I’m not as good with Python as you are but I’m getting better.
I'm not great at Python either, and I'm sure there are cleaner and more elegant ways of doing most of these routines. Hopefully no one's using my code as a learning example 😅
@@saveitforparts - It only matters if you’re working as part of a larger team, which you aren’t. Any decent coder can read your code - even I know what you’re doing line by line.
Was the serial port on the Linux server possibly just disabled in the BIOS? I love the huge range of tech and scripting you cover on this channel BTW!
Could be, I never checked that!
This was my first thought
You aren't grinding any gears, the grinding noise you are hearing is just the stepper motors losing steps. This is actually a pretty common way for motion control systems w/o feedback sensors to find 'home'. The stepper motors will skip steps at torque levels far below the point where it would cause damage to belts or gears, making it a cost effective (although scary sounding) way to home a system. Some/older 3D (and 2D) printers do this, as do CD/DVD drive readers, some flatbed scanners, etc. If you are losing steps/position while the unit is operating, that is likely a result of moving the system too fast. Stepper motors have a torque curve, and at high speeds they have a high chance of skipping.
I agree, it sounds terrible, but there is actually no physical contact being made. Just a vibration of the shaft/motor through the magnetic fields.
Fantastic. Such a great video. Watched the desert trip series with my bro. Great content. Got him interested in the sky!
I really enjoy your videos! Your determination is inspiring!
When it's starting and grinding the gears, I think it's doing that because the current limit feed back is set to high. If their is any adjustability for it, adjusting it down may stop the over torquing issue.
Well now that I know it can be done, I simply must make a radio telescope!
Love your videos. Because of you i bought a RTL-SDR 😀 I would recommend putting a raspberry there and trash the original controller. Those stepper can be better controlled directly. With this setup you also can add switch-endstops.
Man it's beautiful to see how excited while working with this.
Keep it up! :)
i really am mind blown on how you can figure out how to do things like this, if a satellite was put in front of me and i had to make something of it i would be lost!! I really do enjoy watching your content although most of it i dont understand, but it does not matter!
Dude, your channel and content is the absolute coolest. Greetings from the Twin Cities!
I hereby declare you the actual coolest person on RUclips.
I love RUclips videos like these... really feeds my Layman's curiosity.😊
I have no idea what was happening here, but I enjoyed it immensely...
Maybe one of the dipswitches will turn off that self calibration / setellite search mode. If it needs maintainance or some work inside after commissioning, it would be logical for the operator to turn off the feature before powering it up.
I love your videos, something I’ve always dreamed of doing as a kid.
I find your satellite projects very interesting. It's nice that the cat has made a valuable contribution to the project. I hope you find a solution to the problem. I love Python; it's a very powerful language. I use it on the Raspberry Pi Nano.
Your cheesy telephone cable may be the culprit. Higher bit-rates require better cables -- even for these "glacial by todays network standards" speeds. Back when I was a young pup, we ran RS-232 everywhere -- because you had terminals and a central computer. Getting things to work above 9600BPS required better cabling--particularly for longer cabling.
i have not one clue what you are talking about. but i love it. i always get hooked on your videos
I like the longer video personally, even if the end result isn't considered a "success." Generally not really into radio telescopes persay, but anything RF is generally an interest of mine. These little dishes are really pretty neat honestly.
love your content, i would love to see a video about the basic tools and software you need to start hacking like this
Damned if I know, I bought a $15 Software Defined Radio in 2020 and it just snowballed from there😅
The Milk Crate Pedestal Mount is the Best.... True DIY at Heart. Very Fun - Very Informative. Good for you...
First time viewing your stuff. I liked and subscribed not only because it's interesting, but because of your StarGate SG1 dvds
great effort my man! wish I had someone like you in my area to do sat projects like this with
I bought one of these for dirt cheap off ebay with a broken power port years ago. I never had time to really hook anything up to it, but knowing that port has RS485 on it is neat! I'm going to have to dig it up.
You heard it here folks..... Minnesotan trees are talking to the satellites at 1694 MHz
The programmer interface Is JTAG. Used in FPGA and ARM processors
10:38 "That still sounds terrible to me, there there has to be a better way to know the drive limit than just slamming into it and grinding the gears like that" - I liked it ! It reminded me of the grunts and grinds sounds coming out an old Apple ][ floppy disk drive.
Your bodge of usb to serial to rs485 to rj11 breakout is both glorious and also likely to be a source of headaches. Usb to serial adapters are incredibly fickle, and can be huge sources of headaches.
I spent a while working with PLCs which were typically programmed over serial (or rs485, sometimes even rs485 through an rj11 jack like you've got) and the problem was invariably that the PLC hated the usb to serial adapter.
I was surprised when it rained here around Christmas too (I'm in central MN). At least it snowed recently so it seems more like winter.
This looks so cool ! Makes me want to get into whatever this is.
Such a huge video. Thank you so much! Take a rest bro. You deserve it.
The horrible noise when it hits the limits may not be destructive, it's probably just the stepper skipping steps which shouldn't cause any damage. If the belt is skipping them it probably needs to be tensioned more.
That set of tools made me drop my jaw in awe lol
I love that you use an engineering notebook for note taking. I thought I was one of the only ones.
Hey I'm an instant subscriber this guy's content is in my wheelhouse.....love it.😊
I don't know how I went this long without knowing about this channel.... at last you've arrived😂
The Winegard Company is in my hometown of Burlington Iowa.
Amazing how you can see the background from the fence and other objects.
So Cool! -- Love that you got some great images out of it.
Add a Arduino controlled oscillator that squirts a little bit of RF in your target band at the end of every scan to give an in-band sync pulse!
I love these videos so much. You are a blessing to us all!
The L-band patch behind what amounts to a chunk of circular-waveguide will NOT work very well at all. The feedpoint "plumbing" on these dishes is also quite specialized to a particular range of wavelengths -- in the case of these Tailgater type dishes, that's Ku-band, at 11-12GHz, as opposed to the 1.5GHz you're trying for. I'd get stick with the original LNB, and tap into the RF goop at some appropriate point. The card appears to have a multi-output power supply--one of those outputs will be supplying 11-15V for the LNB.
i always find the most interesting videos when i am about to sleep, so i leave this tactical dot .
there is no satellites that i know of..in my office... you are hillarious.greets from Lithuania. love your channel. kep digging
I don't understand everything, but I understand enough to be fascinated. Thank you!
4:13 Couldn't have done it without them.
In terms of stepper control maybe an old 3d printer board would come in handy... serial / easy interface for steppers / easy hardware config for end stops. Track that sat with Gcode! :-) Thanks for the video SIFP always a treat!
I am in love with your videos ❤
Nice work! You've had more patience with the janky controller board that I would have ever had. I would recommend ditching the existing controller and just replacing it with a raspi or something. The vast majority of the functionality of the original board was in handling the RF signal and you're not taking advantage of that and just using it as a very contentious stepper motor controller. If you rolled your own stepper controller you could easily add some rotary encoders and end stops. You could also add a GPS module, an accelerometer and cheap compass module to the base so the unit can automagically handle rough alignment and to point the dish in the approximate direction of a satellite before using RF strength to home in on a signal.
Love your channel dude bro. from Faribault. Chaeers.
You need to explore the world in circuit debuggers!
ICDs are a lot of fun, you don't necessarily have to know programming language.
A lot of it is very similar to what you've been doing elsewhere.
before long he'll have enough RV dishes to build his own very large sparse array radio telescope
I tried building a "Very Small Array" but couldn't get stuff to sync right.
@@saveitforparts may want to look into the "wisper" wspr mode radio clock sync tech for such a task?
Also a very fast/wide network switch synced helps.
A suggestion: maybe put a 6DoF or 9DoF IMU on the dish or feed horn, as you can then get azimuth from the B field, and altitude from the accelerometer. That might make for better output than trusting the open loop control on the stepper motors. Great work!
Also, I used to live up in Roseville, and was a regular over at Ax-Man. Tell 'em Pete says hi when you next stop in!
VCC is power, so it makes sense that wouldn't be used, as the cable frankenstein you made is for data only, and is not transmitting any power
That thumbnail… looks like a modified birdbath from the year 2100…
dude i love your projects , please keep the videos coming!!!!
Wow this is way beyond my DIY skills, but also very interesting.
I know nothing about any of this but it's always fascinated me so I searched RUclips and here we are 😂
🤙So cool, fascinating! The Frankenstein interface cable is great... Halenstein lol
Dude adafruit motor controller for the pi zero will control 2 steppers and you can add limit switches thats how i refited mine. I love your channel!
Really interesting experiments, thanks
Can I have your brain? 😅 when I started visual studio “ 2 weeks late for the semester “ I was completely lost! Can you tell me how to use Alice to message “hello world” to the aliens? lol great job you are a uniquely intelligent person and I admire that! Great video thank you
I actually don't remember much from my programming classes! I remember more from messing with Applesoft BASIC back in the 90's, even though real programmers all say that's a terrible language to learn 😂
Always a delight to watch :)
HAL means hardware abstraction layer... and is like a kernel on a system
It keeps telling me it's sorry, but it can't open the pod bay doors 😢
I feel like this guy is going to become the main character out of nowhere due to some orbital threat in the near future
You can enable the Serial ports on the computer in BIIS. Ensure the cable internally is connected to the motherboard. Usually Baud rate can be set in the terminal device. Serial will ONLY work at the Baud rate set in the terminal.
Fascinating - great work - thanks for sharing!
love this channel
16:47 had me dying ☠️ cat scan😂😂😂
"Wish this thing would stop rotating."
I'm afraid I can't do that, Saveitforparts.
I actually overheard some chatter about Bias-Ts the other day, apparently some of them are designed to bow out if they're getting too much voltage. For instance, using a USB passthrough bias-T while also turning on the Bias-T built into an SDR. I dunno much about it and I don't know if it's applicable to what you're doing. They were talking about SDRPlay internal bias-t and that it has a series of fuses that are designed to pop if too much voltage and the bias-t is disabled, but then goes back to normal after a set period of time. Like, the fuses were meant to blow but it wasn't a permanent thing. I am no electrician.
Congrats on getting some coherent imaging towards the end! I know never to count you out, no matter how bleak things look towards the middle of the video. 😂
Man, if our 12.8m/5.6-tonne dish found its limits by just grinding its gears, it'd be a smoking pile of rubble in no time :)
This is what you get for $300 from Winegard, a dish that lasts maybe 12 months and then has to be replaced because it destroyed itself. Good old planned end-of-life marketing!
@@saveitforparts maybe they assume you would be powering it up only a few times a year as you setup and take down a motor home from its lot space in a park. I also agree that is shameful and they should have charged an extra 20 to 50 bux and made the thing a bit better quality.
Awesome work sir
Hi there,.I love watching Your uploads, I don't understand a word You're saying I just think You are a nice guy, and so enthusiastic. And I think it's great You hack all this tec and even get it working sometimes! Now I reckon it was You!....That messed up that moon lander rocket, with pointing all that tec at the sky! ; - )
Thumbs up for comment about not comprehending too much of the technical jargon - but maybe add a lot more milk crates and bricks to get the dish antenna up higher and “tin” foil hats for your cats (ha)
I always wonder if the dish is big enough for HRPT receiving, the signal would be a lot stronger than GOES satellites. That way you can made an automated NOAA/METEOR/METOP HRPT receiver that is weatherproof :)
You should consider using Onstep (open source telescope stepper controller) to drive the steppers. It's pretty simple to make, and is already designed to control steppers to go to celestial coordinates. Then you could use an INDI telescope driver to connect and script whatever you felt like. Dump the onboard control entirely. You'd need to get the ratio of the reduction from those pulleys, the type of stepper motor etc. It supports limit switches, and microstepping also, so the accuarcy would probably be far superior to the built on system since it's meant for taking pictures through telescopes through long focal lengths.
That sounds interesting! will put this on the to-do list :-)
Your persistence is commendable 😂
Great as always! Still blown away by the amount of these readily available in your area. I'm debating checking the listings out east and just pay the shipping to snag one. I'd really like to see a raspberry pi integration. My idea would be to track the ISS ham repeater using the live/estimated data available in many apps or other web services. I'm sure there are many other pan/tilt devices that would be better suited to support the antenna required for two way contact but a quick and dirty "listen only" antenna may be doable in that package using the protected cover as well. An automated setup triggered by viable passes would be the ultimate goal! Keep tinkering!
"I keep coming out here and doing it again." That's the one shot in golf that make you play another 18 😉
Nice work . 👏 . Keep it up and keep digging you'll get there .
Your Cat scan went well. Your self portatrait was inspired. Upvoted and good day.
Now open the pod bay doors.
Amazing work! Very inspiring!
This is so awesome stuff!
That will be nice to have multiple dish like this to cover a semi sphere that dont move. The advantage will be to scan static position all the time. But you will nee a network switch and a software that handle multiple dish feed to see It all at the same time or in different windows.