Comment by spacedcowboy

Comment by spacedcowboy 9 days ago

2 replies

I had a dish set up in London, 20 years ago (before I came out to the USA). Looked like #1. The dish splits into segments, and I recall driving down the M1 from Birmingham in my battered old Ford Escort, with the (razor-sharp) mesh segments squeezed in and wobbling right next to my jugular... Those dishes were getting vanishingly hard to find in the UK, so it was worth the trip, and I kept my neck intact with only minimal damage...

I had it all packed up when moving out to the US (because my imagination told me that houses in the US were far larger than in the UK). The house I ended up buying (despite having a much larger back garden) didn't have the space to set it up again and remain married, so two decades later, it's still in that wooden case... I do, however, have an optical telescope set up (#2)

Back then, we didn't have easy access to SDR's, so there's a feed horn, a down-converter, and I had an external (standalone) WinRadio receiver to actually listen to the feed. That went into an audio card on a linux box, and the waterfall display was beautiful :)

#1: https://imgur.com/a/CDrEeII

#2: https://imgur.com/a/askar-130phq-scope-sb-myt-mount-26mp-cam...

dylan604 9 days ago

How large is that dish? It doesn’t look much different in size to old school ku-band satellites that were common before cable became ubiquitous.

  • spacedcowboy 8 days ago

    It's about 14' across. It is in fact a ku-band satellite dish, but these were nowhere near as popular in the UK as they were in the US. I was searching for about 6 months before I found one up for sale.