Using a Satellite Dish in Projects

Hey guys I have recently acquired a used DirecTV satellite dish and since I have no idea how this technology works :fearful: I thought it would be best to ask you all how this could be incorporated in a cool arduino-based project. Any ideas? :slight_smile:

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Not much you can do with the dish Im afraid.
They are specifically designed for just one purpose and the electronics that comes with them
is usually just a low noise down converter which needs a special receiver to work.
If you had 2 dishes and lots of spare money, you could make yourself a microwave data link
but thats not a beginners project.

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You could possibly make an active satellite aimer that strives to keep the maximum signal. Since most people just clamp them to the balcony, it is probably not needed. 8^)

I have seen some of these used as cantennas to improve WIFI range. Thats the only use I can think of. You might be able to find a new receiver and use it to pick up free broadcasts.

If it's metal, you may be able to use it as a wok on your stove. Clean any paint off first.

Parabolic dishes are good at focusing sound as well as very short wavelength RF, so if you mounted a microphone at the feedpoint where the LNB is now, you might get a surprisingly good directional sound sniffer. If it is an offset dish, you'll have to remember to aim 'off'.

However, that project would only require a microphone amplifier feeding a pair of headphones - you wouldn't need to involve any microprocessors.

Or: Polish it until it is so shiny that you can just about see your reflection in it, and then put a small solar cell at the focal point. Use an Arduino + a dish steering motor or an old CCTV pan and tilt head to steer the dish so that the focused sunlight always falls on the solar cell, thereby ensuring near-maximum output from the cell.

Warning: If you make the dish into a perfect mirror, anything you place at the focal point will probably be incinerated!

The aim is just to use the dish to collect a lot more more light than would normally fall on the solar cell alone. You'll have to find a balance between the power used by the steering system and the power generated by the solar cell. If the steering system uses more power on average than the cell generates, then obviously it won't be particularly worthwhile, except for the engineering / problem solving aspect of getting it all to work.

wizdum:
I have seen some of these used as cantennas to improve WIFI range. Thats the only use I can think of. You might be able to find a new receiver and use it to pick up free broadcasts.

Actually, I LOVE that idea. If you got a USB 'Nano' sized wifi adaptor, physically mounted it with the antenna part at the focal point of the dish and then trailed a USB extension lead away from it to your computer, you could get a pretty good increase in gain, especially as there would be no RF feeder loss. If mounted outdoors, the adaptor would have to be placed in a microwave-transparent weatherproof box with the USB cable entry sealed to keep water out.

It would be especially good for a fixed link between two buildings too far apart for a normal wifi link.

There is a limit to how far you can push a USB signal down a cable, but I'm not sure what that limit is.

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