The irony of holding up an aluminum foil reinforced umbrella during a storm,while scoping out a weather satellite was comedy gold. You made my evening. Thanks so much for sharing...
Many fiberglass satellite dishes are actually coated with a conductive graphite paint to make them reflective to radio signals. You could actually do this with that umbrella. Conductive paints consist of a solvent-based acrylic binder pigmented with either carbon, nickel, silver-coated copper, silver, or ESD-safe pigments. Imagine trying this with a large patio umbrella! You could use it to receiver C-band TV signals... that would be crazy cool.
I spent my a lot of my young childhood "using" umbrellas as satellite dishes... love seeing "an adult who should know better" trying it for real. Just remembering now that my name for the high-gain antenna on the Apollo Lunar Rover was "the umbrella".
3:51 - Thank you so much for saying that it takes trial and error and time to get something like this working. It's very easy for those of us who are trying to fight with projects for hours or days and get frustrated. It's good to know we're not alone.
I wonder if you can use potato chip bags instead of foil tape (if they're sewn, or glued with something), which are basically foil covered with layers of plastic. Maybe that would result in better foldability of the umbrella.
If anyone wants to give this a go, I've found you can join crisp packets together pretty well by folding a sharp crease with the sheets together n then running a lighter flame along the seam, melting the two together. I can't remember why I tried this, but was surprised how well it worked.
If you wanted to try this, "space blankets" are the same thing, metal film coated on plastic, but come in huge sheets - no need to heat-seam potato chip bags together.
@@mikemondano3624 Who said Mylar was "foil?" Only mention of foil I've seen in this thread was in regard to "foil tape" not the potato chip bags or "space blankets."
I suggest using one of those thermic foil blankets you find in a aid kit, as it usually reflects at least 95% of most radiation types back in what direction you want.
That's super awesome!!! They make parabolic umbrellas with a reflective coating for photography, and I bet if you spray the back side with sno-seal it would work as a regular umbrella too!
I certainly don't understand satellite radio feeds or any of that stuff. But what I do understand is a guy willing to share his failures as well as his successes. The ability to pass on what didn't work is as good as passing on what will work. Many may not understand what I am saying but it is very important. In other words, another excellent video sir.
Finally! I keep finding random rolls of HVAC tape and SDRs in my pockets and I had no idea what they were 😅 I don't know anything about radio but I love watching you build working things out of scraps and junk, very entertaining and ingenious.
It would be neat to build a custom umbrella like mechanism and have a Mylar parabolic. If I still had access to a machine shop I would try to make this. It would be able to close and open still.
I was thinking of replacing the canopy on a cheap umbrella with one made of conductive fabric. Maybe it'd be easier to get a parabola with a cane style umbrella?
@@Ziraya0 weaving in a grid of copper with the smallest gaps being 1/8 of a wavelength in square inches would accomplish the same thing. They don't have to be solid to light. Just solid to the wavelength you're reflecting.
@@wu3705 It reflects it, that said an umbrella shape isn't ideal. If you put a network analyzer on it it would give you a bad SWR getting worse as you went up in frequency and the wavelength got smaller. Nasa had a really crazy inflatable mylar antenna in space long ago back when they did cool things regularly. The kids these days have no idea how cool NASA use to be in my day. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_Antenna_Experiment edit: It wasn't just NASA that was better, Canada was way cooler and more impressive and lead making real innovations back in the day too. Just look up the CRC (Canadian Research Center) They did really cool stuff like the SHARP project where a drone was powered/recharged by a radar beam and they would fly it around. These guys got ruined by Justin Trudeau and his Minister of Industry Navdeep Bains. Now Rogers Wireless board of directors member. This guy was something else he was Rogers Wireless/Rogers Cables puppet in every aspect of his job. Nothing he did was for any purpose other than helping this monopoly.
To answer the title question - *YES* I was in the Army in the 90s. Although I was not in communications my battalion had a field portable sat text/phone that used a metallic fabric umbrella and linked to INMARSAT.
I was the satcom tech. The 90s ones were replaced with a couple varieties the main one was like a bunch of sticks and wire. They found the parabolic thing to not be so important as was the grid array skeleton structure and LNA in higher frequency like EHF. I was also a strategic SHF tech which were the parabolic and larger antennas.
Decades ago we aluminum painted C Band fiberglass dish antennas to to receive the new KU Band satellite TV. I often wondered if an umbrella painted with ALUMINUM paint would receive satellite signals?
Truth! A lot of folks don't realise the amount of editing and trial/error that goes into putting out a RUclips video to make us look "perfect" great job as always, way to innovate!
This is phenomenal! Helped me so much to demystify this kind of technology. I'm a layman on all that and all your "technish" means nothing to me, but I understand the basic concept and now I can understand that this kind of thing is not a uber-ultra-mega-difficult thing. The theme in my mind the whole time is "apocalypse situation" getting satellite data.
Love to see the process; it's about the journey not the destination! I wonder if you could apply the tape in such a way (or apply some precision cuts to the tape) that it can fold along the natural seams of the umbrella 🤔
Hey mate, hi from the UK. Another great video. You should try using a cut up foil blanket glued to the umbrella instead of foil tape. Being much more thin and flexible it might actually be able to be folded up afterwards. Watching your stuff has inspired me to get into trying to get the satellite weather data myself. Not a whole lot of success yet but I'm still trying. 😂
You might be able to use a space blanket and spray adhesive to make the umbrella foldable but still use it as a dish as it's more flexible than HVAC tape.
That is awesome. I have an SDR and I can pick up something around the 152mhz band that sounds like data. And that is just with the stock "rabbit ears" antenna that came with it. Wish I could pick up all of those weather maps with the hurricanes.
There's a lot of random stuff around that frequency range. Business data, TV station audio, private company radios, older police and fire radios, etc. Check out radioreference.com, it's a great site for researching local frequencies.
@@saveitforparts I did hear data around that frequency and I've identified it as POCSAG pager traffic and have decoded it with PDW program on windows. Surprised it's still in use.
This video serves as an awesome reminder to those willing to get into DIY fields like this, or any other DIY-craft I suppose. Very rarely does everything go right, and I bet I could edit down the 80 hours of work into a catchy 20 minute video on my own personal projects like everyone else does if I was into YouTubing lol.
0:30 ... a pack of gum, two shrek dvds (polish dub), my neighbors toothbrush, the tail feather of a toucan, a parking ticket, a q-tip with the cotton removed, one juggling ball, 3D glasses, a bottle cap filled with tabasco, three tabs of LSD, and your mother's blessing.
you're hilarious and informative dude love all the content and you inspired me to mess around with this hobby a month or so ago and it has been tremendously fun, thanks man
I highly doubt they're actually parabolic - you're trying to create an even light with those, but scattered off the reflector so less harsh and not directly from the flash - a true parabolic reflector would give you a point. And for roughly bouncing light around to light an object, you don't need a perfect parabola - just a rough approximation of one. If you're trying to collect RF from a satellite and actually focus it to a receiving antenna, you actually need a real parabola - getting the energy "close" to the antenna but not actually on it is like not getting it at all
@gorak9000 they are indeed parabolas. The idea is that the bulb is at the focus of the parabola, which bounces off the reflector and projects out straight, think of a newtonian telescope mirror in reverse.
The umbrella could still fold with extra work. Essentially the reflective material would be cut to the same pattern as the umbrella webbing. Maybe some sewing or gluing. Overall I rate A+ for time put in vs what you got all things considered
Try using AluShield spray bandage instead of the foil tape, it's conductive, waterproof, flexible, and dirt cheap. Use it for shielding anything in a wood or plastic box, it's a nice lazy hack.
This was a cool project, and something I always wondered about as a kid.. just I didn't know what satellites really did or how they worked. I just would always see the giant satellites in people's backyards in the middle of the desert in the 90s, and always wondered if umbrellas could be a satellite too... Actually got my first kiss sitting inside a giant satellite dish when I was like 5 lol.. also like the peter sripol merch! Also also.. I still don't understand most things satellite.. outside the verrry basic of basics.
I really like this idea! I've seen space blankets brought up, but really any solution that allowed someone to basically "fold up a satellite dish" would be really really awesome.
Who knew the phone installation would be the hardest part? *raises hand* As a firmware and software developer for over a decade I have been railing against the design philosophy used for modern software which builds on heaps of dependencies on an extremely inflexible linking process
Instead of foil tape, try emergency blanket(s) and spray glue (look in the carpet fitting section of any hardware store for the best stuff) I enjoyed this video
I used my Boofweng radio to listen to the I.S.S. On my 3rd attempt I finally picked up some transmissions. My neighbor and his son were there. Lol, now they have Boofweng (baofeng) radios, and we have been monitoring a neighborhood channel. I am going to try this Gabe! Steve, and Little Steve, if you two are reading this…. Heeeeelllllooooooo!!!!
I don't think Gabe is going to appreciate it when you boof him with a radio - that might cause some permanent damage. PJ and Squee might not approve either...
This is the perfect amount of jank, I love it. I wonder if those emergency foil blankets could be used to replace the canvas thing of the umbrella, it might actually be able to fold up then as well
I know the wife will be happy with me when Im out in the garden with an umbrella saying im getting sat data. 🤣You Sir are a bad influence for me, wanting to mess around with other things that I shouldnt be!
use a more parabolical shaped umbrella and spray paint the intside with reflctive metalic paint, might work better? I really liked your initial idea of DIY dish signall receiver, that's so mind openning.
You can never have too many wheelbarrows, usually all the darn things are full of various yard "stuff"! Likewise kayaks, I keep finding cheap ones and for a while I was the friend with the kayaks and the roof rack on every boat trip.
Very interesting Satellite-SDR receiver project delivered with a great sense of humor. Technically fascinating and funny/entertaining at the same time!
A very interesting project; the satellite dish reminds me of the antenna of the Lunar Roving Vehicle, which could also be folded. A metal coating on an umbrella increases its effectiveness as a lightning rod.
That goofy thing is exactly the reason I know the whole rover thing was fake. You saw it flopping around right? And if you're on the moon, what satellite were you fixed onto in the 60s? Such ridiculous crap
Back in the early 80s, the power on the analog c-band transponder was so strong you could use a 3 foot c-band if it was a clear night and get the strongest transponders. Likewise with 10 inch pie pan and a generic circular lnb I was able to get DSS strongest transponders. The 18 foot c-band dish was really nice for all the low power c-band transponders, like the radio station'S links
c-band transponders are much stronger now than they were in the 80's, but they put the satellites a lot closer together now - you need a bigger dish so that you're only receiving one satellite at a time, not because the signal levels are weak. A smaller dish will see the RF from multiple satellites all overplayed over each other, and the signals from the adjacent satellites interfere with the one you actually want.
@@gorak9000 back in the 80s I think they were 100 watts I remember being as much as 3 degrees away and still getting the picture Two sats were 5 degrees apart and had the opposite polarity and if I hit the button on the remote to swap V/H I would get a snowy picture of the other satellite They were really easy to get back in 81 And VCRs were brand new, and had a wired remote If I remember correct 82 they had the first wireless remotes for TV, Cable, VCRs, and the cable TV was fuzzy above 23 and above 35 was unusable When I saw that first C-band image, I was shocked It was the sharpest picture I had ever seen It was like HD NO static, super clear resolution People who would ask why I had one of the dishes, I would show them the picture and they were just as stunned I worked in a TV station and our monitor in the control room was not as clear as the C-band signals But it made sense, because analog over the air TV was 6 mhz Cable TV cut that down even more, but C-band was 200 mhz of bandwidth
@@ocsrc Last I checked, c-band transponders are 36MHz wide, not 200, and analog cable and OTA analog signals are 6Mhz, but I know what you're talking about. The same is still true today, even though everything is digital. The first gen feeds on satellite are super high bitrate - you'd be amazed at what 80Mbps 1080 video looks like. On consumer satellite / cable / OTA, you're lucky to get 8Mbps video for "HD" which looks like crap compared to the first gen signal that hasn't been re-encoded 4 times and compressed from 80Mbps down to 8Mbps! C-band still lives on as a hobby... there's still a few of us out there playing with it! Cell phones taking a huge chunk of the c-band spectrum over is a big blow to it though. Used to be 500Mhz of bandwidth between 3.7Ghz and 4.2Ghz - cellular took over 3.7GHz - 4.0 GHz leaving only 4.0Ghz to 4.2Ghz for c-band now. The FCC made millions (or billions?) auctioning that spectrum off to the cellular carriers though. Some TV distribution transitioned to fiber now rather than paying for the higher prices of what's left of the c-band spectrum. All of the live news feeds have disappeared from Ku Band a few years ago - no one uses satellite trucks anymore for live news feeds, everything is LiveU now, which is a little backpack encoder with 6 or 8 cellular modems, and they ship video over bonded cellular links and the internet back to the station. Watching the raw live news feeds was the best part of the satellite hobby. Seeing the reporters demeanor instantly changing from complaining about how f'ing cold it is, and "what's that f'ing noise in my ear on the IFB" and being generally super rude to everyone, to smiling and the nicest person ever when they're actually going live was amazing. I'm convinced they all have multiple personality disorder.
@Gabe, Adafruit has conductive fabric. Makes me wonder if you could use that instead of layers of aluminum tape? Not for sure what the efficiency or reflectivity would be but it might be an interesting experiment 😮
You could try using reflective spraypaint, instead of tape, it may not offer the same reflectivity, but it might just be enough, also this would allow the umbrella to fold.
You should try this with sprayed on Rustoleum Cold Galvanizing Compound or some other spray metal like metallic gold/silver/aluminum and see how reflective they are. That would make it more portable since it could fold and way faster to make the reflector.
We're facing some unearthly heat, and a girl had a terrible(not actually) idea, she used a spray contact adhesive and space blanket to the external side of the umbrella to block UVa/UVb radiation, and she did sold a lot, so I was wondering, if you could do the same thing with another umbrella, but puting the space blanket by the inside and then, making if portable again
I always wondered this. Somehow I inherited a cameraman's flash umbrella that has foil coating on it to direct light and I though can this be used as a sat dish. It seems more rounder than yours too.
Yes, I was going to say about that, there are camera flash umbrella that already has everything : tripod mount, it is reflexive and you easily as a holder to the receptor!
Did you know there are cheap umbrella that already has a reflexive side for hot days? They are called parasol. Anyway, the better solution would be photography reflexive umbrella for flash with support mount
I honestly love these weird ass designs and jobs with little materials. It's what helps you learn, and what makes it so fun. The experimentation. Could use a silver based spray paint to reflect images on the umbrella rather than the foil tape?
The irony of holding up an aluminum foil reinforced umbrella during a storm,while scoping out a weather satellite was comedy gold. You made my evening. Thanks so much for sharing...
🤝🔥😅🫶🏼✊🏼😎😂💯 Shalom. Ciao.
gotta find out the forcast
Nah worries mayte
Many fiberglass satellite dishes are actually coated with a conductive graphite paint to make them reflective to radio signals. You could actually do this with that umbrella. Conductive paints consist of a solvent-based acrylic binder pigmented with either carbon, nickel, silver-coated copper, silver, or ESD-safe pigments. Imagine trying this with a large patio umbrella! You could use it to receiver C-band TV signals... that would be crazy cool.
most fiberglass satellite dishes have a fine wire mesh embedded into the fiberglass and resin, not anything in the paint.
Might work with zinc paint too, the stuff used for rust protection.
Conductive paint is not a reflector of radio waves.
if ur ok using non automatic one u can chop end off invert the shaft
I spent my a lot of my young childhood "using" umbrellas as satellite dishes... love seeing "an adult who should know better" trying it for real.
Just remembering now that my name for the high-gain antenna on the Apollo Lunar Rover was "the umbrella".
Just bought my first kit because of you just have to wait 9 hrs for the sat
3:51 - Thank you so much for saying that it takes trial and error and time to get something like this working. It's very easy for those of us who are trying to fight with projects for hours or days and get frustrated. It's good to know we're not alone.
“Crime against antenna theory” 😂
I wonder if you can use potato chip bags instead of foil tape (if they're sewn, or glued with something), which are basically foil covered with layers of plastic. Maybe that would result in better foldability of the umbrella.
If anyone wants to give this a go, I've found you can join crisp packets together pretty well by folding a sharp crease with the sheets together n then running a lighter flame along the seam, melting the two together. I can't remember why I tried this, but was surprised how well it worked.
If you wanted to try this, "space blankets" are the same thing, metal film coated on plastic, but come in huge sheets - no need to heat-seam potato chip bags together.
Mylar emergency blankets are made of the same material.
They aren't "foil". They are Mylar.
@@mikemondano3624 Who said Mylar was "foil?" Only mention of foil I've seen in this thread was in regard to "foil tape" not the potato chip bags or "space blankets."
I suggest using one of those thermic foil blankets you find in a aid kit, as it usually reflects at least 95% of most radiation types back in what direction you want.
'absolute crime against antenna theory' :)))
3:27 What a glorious moment
That's super awesome!!! They make parabolic umbrellas with a reflective coating for photography, and I bet if you spray the back side with sno-seal it would work as a regular umbrella too!
you thought an umbrella was not good for satellite reception you thought wrong
Next door neighbor is watching you and speed dialing 911. Another amazing video...
You sir, are a freaking GENIUS!
I certainly don't understand satellite radio feeds or any of that stuff. But what I do understand is a guy willing to share his failures as well as his successes. The ability to pass on what didn't work is as good as passing on what will work. Many may not understand what I am saying but it is very important. In other words, another excellent video sir.
Thanks! Glad you like it :-)
cover the metal beams with foil and add ducktape to back on umbrella to prevent shaking
Finally! I keep finding random rolls of HVAC tape and SDRs in my pockets and I had no idea what they were 😅 I don't know anything about radio but I love watching you build working things out of scraps and junk, very entertaining and ingenious.
was there a cat too?
'if only i had some sort of umbrella for this weather' :))
Silly Side Projects are often the most entertaining ones.
8:35 - getting both apps to work splitscreen like that and have active aiming ability. Loved it.
It would be neat to build a custom umbrella like mechanism and have a Mylar parabolic. If I still had access to a machine shop I would try to make this. It would be able to close and open still.
I was thinking of replacing the canopy on a cheap umbrella with one made of conductive fabric. Maybe it'd be easier to get a parabola with a cane style umbrella?
I bet a talented seamtress can whip one up real quick
@@Ziraya0 weaving in a grid of copper with the smallest gaps being 1/8 of a wavelength in square inches would accomplish the same thing. They don't have to be solid to light. Just solid to the wavelength you're reflecting.
I thought of mylar as well. Will mylar reflect radio waves or will they pass through? I have no idea.
@@wu3705 It reflects it, that said an umbrella shape isn't ideal. If you put a network analyzer on it it would give you a bad SWR getting worse as you went up in frequency and the wavelength got smaller.
Nasa had a really crazy inflatable mylar antenna in space long ago back when they did cool things regularly.
The kids these days have no idea how cool NASA use to be in my day.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_Antenna_Experiment
edit: It wasn't just NASA that was better, Canada was way cooler and more impressive and lead making real innovations back in the day too.
Just look up the CRC (Canadian Research Center) They did really cool stuff like the SHARP project where a drone was powered/recharged by a radar beam and they would fly it around.
These guys got ruined by Justin Trudeau and his Minister of Industry Navdeep Bains. Now Rogers Wireless board of directors member.
This guy was something else he was Rogers Wireless/Rogers Cables puppet in every aspect of his job. Nothing he did was for any purpose other than helping this monopoly.
To answer the title question - *YES*
I was in the Army in the 90s. Although I was not in communications my battalion had a field portable sat text/phone that used a metallic fabric umbrella and linked to INMARSAT.
I was the satcom tech. The 90s ones were replaced with a couple varieties the main one was like a bunch of sticks and wire. They found the parabolic thing to not be so important as was the grid array skeleton structure and LNA in higher frequency like EHF. I was also a strategic SHF tech which were the parabolic and larger antennas.
Decades ago we aluminum painted C Band fiberglass dish antennas to to receive the new KU Band satellite TV. I often wondered if an umbrella painted with ALUMINUM paint would receive satellite signals?
You made an _Umbrellabolic Dish._ 😊
you have no idea how happy this makes me!
that something so silly and cartoonish actually works!
"Crime against antenna theory" 🤣 MacGyver would be proud 😎
There's something so beautiful about using an umbrella to listen to the weather XD
Please keep doing what you’re doing. This is gold!
a communist Android well damn what will they think of next?🤣
I always figured something like a folding vegetable steamer would be a decent way to make a radio dish more portable but this is way better.
I've used one of those for Wifi before.
@@saveitforparts I’ve only watched this one video by you and I’m already ready to believe that immediately
I probably still have it in the basement somewhere, I should pull that out and do a short about it 😂
@@saveitforparts I fully support that plan!
I appreciate your sense of humor almost more than your technical skills 😄
"Crime against antenna theory" had me laughing so hard 😂🤣
Also the hair cut and trim looks great
Truth! A lot of folks don't realise the amount of editing and trial/error that goes into putting out a RUclips video to make us look "perfect" great job as always, way to innovate!
I love this idea retractable non suspicious looking antenna with adjustable focal point
Sweet build. Duck tape actually refers to the duck cloth it's made of. From the Dutch word doek.
This is phenomenal! Helped me so much to demystify this kind of technology. I'm a layman on all that and all your "technish" means nothing to me, but I understand the basic concept and now I can understand that this kind of thing is not a uber-ultra-mega-difficult thing. The theme in my mind the whole time is "apocalypse situation" getting satellite data.
Love to see the process; it's about the journey not the destination! I wonder if you could apply the tape in such a way (or apply some precision cuts to the tape) that it can fold along the natural seams of the umbrella 🤔
This was fun! These are the kind of vids that made me fall in love with the Save It For Parts channel.
Can't tell if this should get a Red Green or a MacGyver award.
Sweet, I begged Myth Busters to do this one. They never did. Glad to see the results.
What "myth" is this? That you can cobble a bunch of junk together to sort of half-baked 'work'?
@@gorak9000
Tell me you never saw the movie ET with out telling me you never saw the movie ET.
The fact that I don’t understand anything of how and what are you doing but I still love watching your videos.
You sir have MASSIVE pockets
Magnificently silly idea. RUclips needs more of this kind of stuff.
Hey mate, hi from the UK. Another great video. You should try using a cut up foil blanket glued to the umbrella instead of foil tape. Being much more thin and flexible it might actually be able to be folded up afterwards. Watching your stuff has inspired me to get into trying to get the satellite weather data myself. Not a whole lot of success yet but I'm still trying. 😂
I might try the foil blanket thing next!
@@saveitforpartsMaybe look up Faraday Cloth.
@@saveitforparts Also you wouldn't necessarily have to tape it to the inside either.
Finally a man with real questions and good answers.
This man don't know a Xiaomi poco , but can download satélite data with random stuff😅
the cat coming over was going "how did you fit all of that in your pocket?"
You might be able to use a space blanket and spray adhesive to make the umbrella foldable but still use it as a dish as it's more flexible than HVAC tape.
You could spray the inside of the umbrella with conductive nickel paint. Or use conductive fabric.
That looks like the contents of my wife’s purse. Add Kleenex and lipstick and you’re there.
This is great! I've had an RTL-SDR for years and never really put it to use.
Now, I wanna see what his neighbors were thinking, with him holding up a tinfoil umbrella and pointing it at the sky.
That is awesome. I have an SDR and I can pick up something around the 152mhz band that sounds like data. And that is just with the stock "rabbit ears" antenna that came with it.
Wish I could pick up all of those weather maps with the hurricanes.
There's a lot of random stuff around that frequency range. Business data, TV station audio, private company radios, older police and fire radios, etc. Check out radioreference.com, it's a great site for researching local frequencies.
@@saveitforparts I did hear data around that frequency and I've identified it as POCSAG pager traffic and have decoded it with PDW program on windows. Surprised it's still in use.
I loved your humor in this video. You're the Red Green of Radio.
This one really challenged my ability to suspend my disbelief. Do you really expect me to believe that you wouldn't make room for the cat?
0:20 Omg, best intro ever!! The blooper reel was worth it
You won the internet today
This video serves as an awesome reminder to those willing to get into DIY fields like this, or any other DIY-craft I suppose. Very rarely does everything go right, and I bet I could edit down the 80 hours of work into a catchy 20 minute video on my own personal projects like everyone else does if I was into YouTubing lol.
0:30 ... a pack of gum, two shrek dvds (polish dub), my neighbors toothbrush, the tail feather of a toucan, a parking ticket, a q-tip with the cotton removed, one juggling ball, 3D glasses, a bottle cap filled with tabasco, three tabs of LSD, and your mother's blessing.
chill, You're not cursed at all, because that is not an umbrella, it's a satelite dish, tecnicly, Your good. Nice proyect!!
you're hilarious and informative dude love all the content and you inspired me to mess around with this hobby a month or so ago and it has been tremendously fun, thanks man
You should try a photography flash umbrella, they're parabolic. It would be a good comparison
I can't tell if they're actually metallic or just silvery cloth.
@@saveitforparts nothing a bit of aluminium mesh won't sort out.
I highly doubt they're actually parabolic - you're trying to create an even light with those, but scattered off the reflector so less harsh and not directly from the flash - a true parabolic reflector would give you a point. And for roughly bouncing light around to light an object, you don't need a perfect parabola - just a rough approximation of one. If you're trying to collect RF from a satellite and actually focus it to a receiving antenna, you actually need a real parabola - getting the energy "close" to the antenna but not actually on it is like not getting it at all
@gorak9000 they are indeed parabolas. The idea is that the bulb is at the focus of the parabola, which bounces off the reflector and projects out straight, think of a newtonian telescope mirror in reverse.
Okay, I wanna do this.
The umbrella could still fold with extra work. Essentially the reflective material would be cut to the same pattern as the umbrella webbing. Maybe some sewing or gluing.
Overall I rate A+ for time put in vs what you got all things considered
This was your coolest side quest!!!!
Man, i think you could take a soup can and make anything out of it.
Try using AluShield spray bandage instead of the foil tape, it's conductive, waterproof, flexible, and dirt cheap. Use it for shielding anything in a wood or plastic box, it's a nice lazy hack.
This was a cool project, and something I always wondered about as a kid.. just I didn't know what satellites really did or how they worked. I just would always see the giant satellites in people's backyards in the middle of the desert in the 90s, and always wondered if umbrellas could be a satellite too... Actually got my first kiss sitting inside a giant satellite dish when I was like 5 lol.. also like the peter sripol merch!
Also also.. I still don't understand most things satellite.. outside the verrry basic of basics.
I didn't know much about them either, just started poking around at stuff that I saw other people online doing :-)
Finally a tutorial that utilizes every item in my pocket.
Came for the satellite, stayed for the goose.
3:27 "...so let's hook my phone up to my umbrella and try to download some satellite data"
I really like this idea! I've seen space blankets brought up, but really any solution that allowed someone to basically "fold up a satellite dish" would be really really awesome.
Who knew the phone installation would be the hardest part? *raises hand* As a firmware and software developer for over a decade I have been railing against the design philosophy used for modern software which builds on heaps of dependencies on an extremely inflexible linking process
Instead of foil tape, try emergency blanket(s) and spray glue (look in the carpet fitting section of any hardware store for the best stuff)
I enjoyed this video
I used my Boofweng radio to listen to the I.S.S. On my 3rd attempt I finally picked up some transmissions. My neighbor and his son were there. Lol, now they have Boofweng (baofeng) radios, and we have been monitoring a neighborhood channel. I am going to try this Gabe!
Steve, and Little Steve, if you two are reading this…. Heeeeelllllooooooo!!!!
I don't think Gabe is going to appreciate it when you boof him with a radio - that might cause some permanent damage. PJ and Squee might not approve either...
you can try stitching the foil to the umbrella, also you can stick the foil on the other side(top), it need not be underneath.
This is the perfect amount of jank, I love it. I wonder if those emergency foil blankets could be used to replace the canvas thing of the umbrella, it might actually be able to fold up then as well
I unironically like this design on the actual umbrella itself, and was surprised to see it. :o
I thought about this for decades.. thanks for doing it! This is great.
The big floofy kat ❤❤❤ 😊 made me happy when she?he jumped up and inspected the gear.
McGyver edition! 👍
I know the wife will be happy with me when Im out in the garden with an umbrella saying im getting sat data. 🤣You Sir are a bad influence for me, wanting to mess around with other things that I shouldnt be!
Now I want to build a patio umbrella that can flip over and face the sky and track satellites
use a more parabolical shaped umbrella and spray paint the intside with reflctive metalic paint, might work better? I really liked your initial idea of DIY dish signall receiver, that's so mind openning.
This video had me cracking up while still being super informative! You also have more wheelbarrows and kayaks than any mad scientist I know!
You can never have too many wheelbarrows, usually all the darn things are full of various yard "stuff"! Likewise kayaks, I keep finding cheap ones and for a while I was the friend with the kayaks and the roof rack on every boat trip.
такой тёплый ламповый канал :) спасибо!
such a warm cozy channel :) thank you
Very interesting Satellite-SDR receiver project delivered with a great sense of humor. Technically fascinating and funny/entertaining at the same time!
A very interesting project; the satellite dish reminds me of the antenna of the Lunar Roving Vehicle, which could also be folded. A metal coating on an umbrella increases its effectiveness as a lightning rod.
That goofy thing is exactly the reason I know the whole rover thing was fake. You saw it flopping around right? And if you're on the moon, what satellite were you fixed onto in the 60s? Such ridiculous crap
Back in the early 80s, the power on the analog c-band transponder was so strong you could use a 3 foot c-band if it was a clear night and get the strongest transponders.
Likewise with 10 inch pie pan and a generic circular lnb I was able to get DSS strongest transponders.
The 18 foot c-band dish was really nice for all the low power c-band transponders, like the radio station'S links
c-band transponders are much stronger now than they were in the 80's, but they put the satellites a lot closer together now - you need a bigger dish so that you're only receiving one satellite at a time, not because the signal levels are weak. A smaller dish will see the RF from multiple satellites all overplayed over each other, and the signals from the adjacent satellites interfere with the one you actually want.
@@gorak9000 back in the 80s I think they were 100 watts
I remember being as much as 3 degrees away and still getting the picture
Two sats were 5 degrees apart and had the opposite polarity and if I hit the button on the remote to swap V/H I would get a snowy picture of the other satellite
They were really easy to get back in 81
And VCRs were brand new, and had a wired remote
If I remember correct 82 they had the first wireless remotes for TV, Cable, VCRs, and the cable TV was fuzzy above 23 and above 35 was unusable
When I saw that first C-band image, I was shocked
It was the sharpest picture I had ever seen
It was like HD
NO static, super clear resolution
People who would ask why I had one of the dishes, I would show them the picture and they were just as stunned
I worked in a TV station and our monitor in the control room was not as clear as the C-band signals
But it made sense, because analog over the air TV was 6 mhz
Cable TV cut that down even more, but C-band was 200 mhz of bandwidth
@@ocsrc Last I checked, c-band transponders are 36MHz wide, not 200, and analog cable and OTA analog signals are 6Mhz, but I know what you're talking about. The same is still true today, even though everything is digital. The first gen feeds on satellite are super high bitrate - you'd be amazed at what 80Mbps 1080 video looks like. On consumer satellite / cable / OTA, you're lucky to get 8Mbps video for "HD" which looks like crap compared to the first gen signal that hasn't been re-encoded 4 times and compressed from 80Mbps down to 8Mbps! C-band still lives on as a hobby... there's still a few of us out there playing with it! Cell phones taking a huge chunk of the c-band spectrum over is a big blow to it though. Used to be 500Mhz of bandwidth between 3.7Ghz and 4.2Ghz - cellular took over 3.7GHz - 4.0 GHz leaving only 4.0Ghz to 4.2Ghz for c-band now. The FCC made millions (or billions?) auctioning that spectrum off to the cellular carriers though. Some TV distribution transitioned to fiber now rather than paying for the higher prices of what's left of the c-band spectrum. All of the live news feeds have disappeared from Ku Band a few years ago - no one uses satellite trucks anymore for live news feeds, everything is LiveU now, which is a little backpack encoder with 6 or 8 cellular modems, and they ship video over bonded cellular links and the internet back to the station. Watching the raw live news feeds was the best part of the satellite hobby. Seeing the reporters demeanor instantly changing from complaining about how f'ing cold it is, and "what's that f'ing noise in my ear on the IFB" and being generally super rude to everyone, to smiling and the nicest person ever when they're actually going live was amazing. I'm convinced they all have multiple personality disorder.
Schell's brewery. I see you're a man of taste as well.
hahaha the umbrella pun🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@Gabe, Adafruit has conductive fabric. Makes me wonder if you could use that instead of layers of aluminum tape? Not for sure what the efficiency or reflectivity would be but it might be an interesting experiment 😮
You could try using reflective spraypaint, instead of tape, it may not offer the same reflectivity, but it might just be enough, also this would allow the umbrella to fold.
I seriously appreciate the dedication to all of your projects. I keep learning and I love it!
You need baggy cargo pants so the cat can fit in your pocket.
You should try this with sprayed on Rustoleum Cold Galvanizing Compound or some other spray metal like metallic gold/silver/aluminum and see how reflective they are. That would make it more portable since it could fold and way faster to make the reflector.
They already make popout reflective umbrella for photography
We're facing some unearthly heat, and a girl had a terrible(not actually) idea, she used a spray contact adhesive and space blanket to the external side of the umbrella to block UVa/UVb radiation, and she did sold a lot, so I was wondering, if you could do the same thing with another umbrella, but puting the space blanket by the inside and then, making if portable again
I always wondered this. Somehow I inherited a cameraman's flash umbrella that has foil coating on it to direct light and I though can this be used as a sat dish. It seems more rounder than yours too.
Yes, I was going to say about that, there are camera flash umbrella that already has everything : tripod mount, it is reflexive and you easily as a holder to the receptor!
I don't know why this video showed up in my feed but I found it very amusing.
There’s a lot of old ladies rolling in their graves after you opening the umbrella. Haha. Nice work
Did you know there are cheap umbrella that already has a reflexive side for hot days? They are called parasol. Anyway, the better solution would be photography reflexive umbrella for flash with support mount
I honestly love these weird ass designs and jobs with little materials. It's what helps you learn, and what makes it so fun. The experimentation. Could use a silver based spray paint to reflect images on the umbrella rather than the foil tape?
Most metallic paint doesn't have much if any actual metal, I did order some of the fancy stuff with high metal content and will try that.
finally i can sleep when my brain comes up with that question again