If its really dumb, sorry.
But can you connect an LNB to an Arduino?
If i'm not mad i think you can't read signals since those are on the GHz freq.
But can i read atleast signal intensity?
When i connect an multimeter to it i see an occilation on resistance, can i use that for something?
I'm asking bc i'm afraid of burning my nano
Sorry and thanks in advance
You can connect them but I doubt it will give you what you want. You best put a tuned circuit in front of the Arduino to down convert the signal to something you can use.
The "signals" are AC, alternating current at several hundred million cycles per second. What you can do is use a diode to convert to DC, filter that DC with a capacitor, feed the DC to a resistor connected to ground and measure the DC voltage across the resistor.
The actual values of the components will have to be determined by experimentation.
So i assume directling jacketing the coaxial to the nano will make it toast
What is the DC voltage between the coax center and the shield?
Directly from the LNB?
Also idk if its against the rules but if you have a messaging app like telegram or discord it would help discussing this further
There is nothing to discuss. You have told it all here.
What exactly do you want to do. Position a satellite dish?
The 1-2Ghz an LNB outputs is way out of reach of any Arduino. And then there is the DC voltage of 13volt/18volt that powers the LNB through the coax, with or without a 22kHz signal.
Satfinders on ebay/Amazon etc. start at the price of a Nano clone.
Pay more, and you get more features.
Leo..
The 22kHz signal you send to an LNB is used to change the polarity of the receiver, from horizontal to vertical.
Yes, I know. I used to install satellite dishes in Europe, before and during the start-up of satellite TV in the eighties. Some had a servo for that inside the horn.
Leo..
I just want to mess around with a satelite dish for fun
I heard somewhere you have to comunicate with the lnb to change the freq/band its receiving how does that work?
Not the best language.
You need to do some research about microwaves and LNBs, how they work AND the receiver that needs to be connected to the LNB output.
The LNB needs to be provided with power along its output coax connection.
Can you please tell us your electronics, programming, arduino, hardware experience?
Tom... 
Hi! Tom
I'm a systems developer with 4 years of experience
I just got into electronics related stuff
About hardware i have atleast surface theoric knowledge of how they work (like inductors armazenating energy in the magnetic field, how leds emit light, etc)
I spent the last day reading about lnbs, here's what i got
I read somewhere alongsude the tone you have to send a "channel select" to the lnb, could you explain it to me
Also if the "channel select" doesn't exist, could i decode the data stream using a Fourier transformer?
Sorry for the language
Thanks for the attention
No, not really.
The data that gets sent down to the receiver is not a single TV signal, but a whole "multiplex" (mux for short). That could be five or six channels all at once. It is up to the set top box to pick out what "mux" it wants to display.
This mux consist of what is known as a constellation, that is a collection of amplitude and phase signals. When this is displayed it can look like a group of stars.
My last big job in industry was a project that would take a whole mux and split into one or more channels, and then recreate a custom mix of muxes and modulate them into the normal cable TV system for a block of flats. A band from 400MHz to about 950MHz.
This was done by using several very powerful FPGA devices to synthesise the whole band. This involved some stupidly fast A/D converters stuck onto the ends of the FPGAs.
One whole system cost about £25,000.
So it is not anything remotely you can do with software even on the fastest of computers.
So how do i pick a constellation? By pointing my dish on the right direction?
So to decode the data i've to use a demux then
Also coulsn't i make a decoder using something like a Qc 870 that is a 3Ghz+ even if it is 1 instruction per clock cycle (couldn't find the number ipcc) its enough to record things to ram for later processing, but hen it wouldn't be using a pc so fair.
Lastly, how does exactly data travels in the oposite direction? If i send power center positive i read data center negative?
Let me reply to the "lastly" question. You are overthinking this. We have the LNB up there that needs DC power in order to operate. It is connected the decoder box down here by a coaxial cable that carries the RF signal. We can use the same cable the supply power to the LNB. The decoder box contains the DC power supply for the LNB and we can connect the negative supply terminal to the coax shield on both ends with no problem. But, there is a problem connecting the positive terminal to the coax center wire because the power supply will short out the signal unless we can isolate the RF. We use an RFC, radio frequency choke, for that. It is a specially designed inductor. [Remember that an inductor opposes the change in current flowing through it. So, DC can flow easily but RF will be blocked, choked off.] So the coax center conductor is connected through RFCs at both ends and both RF and DC can use the same cable.
I don't think you understood what I said.
The constellation is the data signal, you do not pick one, there is only one per mux. What part of the mux contains of what station is found by a sequence of digits known as the PID (Program IDentifacation), which is contained in the data mux. but to save time in development, software engineers used to "remember" the PID from one channel. It was the now defunct "fashion channel" which was almost continuous "cat walk" displays. Us hardware people used joke about what an imposition this was, and how they must suffer.
Most TV systems use MP3 encoding, MP4 was just coming in when I left the industry and so I have not much experience with that.
No, you are mixing up the word "mux" with the normal electronic meaning of the word "time division multiplexer". There is time division multiplexing involved, but only in the decoding / compression section of the process.
No.
where are you going to get ram that is fast enough to do this? And what do you think you can do with three machine code instructions?
The whole encoding / decoding process is a lot more complex, with error correcting codes being included in the muxes as well. These ensure that a signal with errors can be corrected code. This is based on the Hamming distance of two signals
And allows you to provide a FEC (Forward Error Correction) function that masks poor signals.
@kalipsoidal gave you a perfectly good answer, but an example might be simpler to follow.
It is exactly like "Power Over IP" where you have a DC power signal but also modulate the data at some much higher frequency. So you can extract the bits of the mixture you want by means of filters.
Also just like the power line communications I experimented with when I was a kid back in the mid 60s. It is now a much more main stream and formalised thing:-
If it is just for fun then:
You'll need to add a DC blocking capacitor (say 10..100pf) and an UHF diode rectifier loaded with LC (say 47pf to the ground, 1uH inductor) filter.
Better of course if you do the impedance matching (simple transformer) but it should works without it as well
Then you can feed it to your board to measure the signal level. The signal will be in the millivolt range and probably you'll also need an opamp to increase it to get better resolution.
If you want to get the real values (in dB) then you can take a look at MAXIM IC's designed specifically for your task (max2015 if i remember correctly).
Ah thanks!
So how do i demux the signals and pick the one i'm planning to use (Dont worry its not a xy problem, i'm not gonna use them, just so i can learn something new)
