Saveitforparts

I’ve been making progress on the radio observatory / satellite tracking station at Sandland. We picked this 18ft geodesic radome up a couple years ago from the Carp Observatory and have been slowly getting it put together.

During 2025 I poured a cement footing and installed a satellite dish and motorized pointing system. This is only a 6ft (~1.8M) diameter antenna. The current motor is based on a large pan/tilt mount (Quickset QPT-90) from a vintage security camera. Eventually I hope to install a larger reflector and a more capable motor. I got this dish from Ax-Man Surplus (they don’t often have them and their inventory is constantly changing). I’ve heard these are also sold online as solar cookers.

The motor is run by an Arduino microcontroller and surplus 24vAC power supply. Coordinates are passed to the Arduino via serial (USB) connection from a laptop, and the pan/tilt mount uses built-in potentiometers to determine where it’s pointing. I’m using code originally from SARCnet which I’ve modified to work with this setup. The laptop runs Gpredict to calculate positions from orbital data. It also runs SDR++ to record signals from a HackRF One software-defined radio.

Other projects in 2025 involved finishing the doorway for the dome, so now we can close out wind, rain, and larger wildlife. This took a few tries, people kept leaving the door open for the wind to damage it. The dome is really nice once it’s all closed up, even on a cold February day it’s a nice protected work space! And not having to worry about wind pushing the dish around is nice as well.

I’ve also been calibrating the dish to known geographic coordinates and orientation, so we can get the most accurate pointing. This will be critical when doing astronomy projects, and when tracking fast-moving Low-Earth-Orbit satellites with weak radios.

After calibration and some adjustments to my code, the dish has been working great at tracking satellites! It’s so large that I can use almost any feed at the focal point, I’ve been reliably receiving linear L-Band signals with a circular S-Band feed!

As usual I have a number of videos about this project on YouTube. You can check some of them out below!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2026 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.