A Cyberdeck Satellite Dish

Gabe Emerson of the Saveitforparts YouTube channel is no stranger to unique projects. He has created multiple cyberdecks, satellites, and various unique electronics projects. His most recent project combines a cyberdeck with a parabolic dish antenna to form a handheld weather satellite tracking device.

Like most of his projects, the idea started with some old parts he had lying around. A 30-inch parabolic dish originally intended for networking applications serves as the starting point for the antenna. The antenna to be built will be specifically for L-band frequencies. The L-band is where many satellite frequencies can be found. The spectrum offers reasonable antenna size, lot’s of bandwidth, and higher resilience to interference from weather conditions such as rain. Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) frequencies can be found at approximately 1.2GHz, 1.3GHz and 1.5GHz. In addition, weather satellites can also be found in the L-band. This includes the NOAA weather satellite operating at 1694.1MHz.

With the goal of receiving signals from the weather satellites the antenna must be designed for 1.5 - 1.7GHz. The parabolic dish acts as a reflector to divert wireless signals to a smaller feed antenna. The smaller feed antenna must be designed and tuned for 1.7GHz. To achieve this a helical antenna was constructed using copper wire wrapped around a PVC pipe. The copper wire was wrapped around the PVC with 5 turns, with each turn consistently spaced 40mm from the previous turn. This design was referenced from another project which proved to work well. This was then placed on the feed point with a cookie can lid to hold it in place. After adding an LNA to improve the noise of the received signal, the construction of the antenna was completed.

The next step involved adding a tablet PC to the back of the dish with the intention of being to be able to run SDR software on the device. For this an old MobileDemand tablet with a keyboard was used. Although this worked, it did present its own challenges. First after trying to velcro the tablet to the back of the satellite dish, the case of the tablet broke apart. This was fixed with some hot glue but an alternative method of mounting the device to the dish had to be used. Next, the tablet turned out to have an older 32-bit Intel processor. This presented a lot of challenges with getting operating systems, drivers, and software to run on the device.

After taking the device out for a test, the design proved to be capable of receiving satellite signals successfully. To help with tracking, a smartphone was mounted to the back of the dish with the Stellarium mobile app running. The app allows a user to see exactly what is in the sky when pointing the phone at the sky. This includes stars, planets, and in this case, weather satellites! After capturing data with the first test the tablet once again presented an issue. It was unable to decode the data reliably. This was proven to be due to hardware limitations with the tablet. However, the overall design strategy proved to work. Future improvements to the project include using a more reliable tablet for processing received signals and running software. In addition, holding the dish above the head for an extended amount of time turned out to be a burden, thus some sort of dish mounting stand is also in order.