Caught my first stable signal from a homemade dish this morning

I used to just buy those little flat antennas from the store and hope for the best... got maybe 3 channels on a good day. Last month I built a proper 60cm dish out of an old satellite TV reflector and some copper wire I had lying around. After tweaking the feed horn position for 2 hours, I locked onto a weather satellite passing over Atlanta around 6 AM. It's not much but it's my first real catch without buying any fancy gear. Has anyone else started with a repurposed dish and found it way better than store bought stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan56115h ago

Man that 60cm dish is actually a sweet size for catching weather satellites. I started with a 90cm DirecTV dish I found in an alley and stripped the LNB off, twisted some copper wire into a dipole. Took me three weekends of adjusting the focal point before I got a clear pass of NOAA 19. One trick I learned is to use a cheap compass app on your phone to line up the azimuth by eye first, then fine tune the elevation with a protractor taped to the mount. The store bought flat panels just don't have the gain for anything above a strong local station.

irisowens14h ago

Three weekends for one satellite pass seems like a lot of screwing around for something a $20 RTL-SDR dongle and a pre-made antenna can pick up in an afternoon. Are you sure you weren't just overcomplicating it?

xena_bailey189h ago

Three weekends for one satellite pass" - yeah, I feel that pain. I did almost the same thing with a rusty old Primestar dish and a hacked together feed. The thing people don't get is that half the fun is the tinkering, and you learn way more about antenna theory from messing with focal points than just plugging in a pre-built thing. That compass and protractor trick is solid, I still use a cheap plastic protractor on my QFH build to this day. And you're right about the flat panels, they're fine for strong FM or broadcast TV but they fall apart when you need real gain. My only addition would be to use a signal meter app on your phone instead of a standalone meter, it saves you from buying extra gear. But honestly, three weekends of work for a clear NOAA 19 pass is a victory in my book, that first image coming through makes it all worth it.