Comment by waerhert
Thanks for the compliment and links! Can you tell me more about the aircraft tracking? I've been toying with the idea of being able to select a nearby airplane on flightradar24 and instructing the mount to follow it as it comes into view. Not sure how I would even begin building that.
You could actually build a self-contained unit with a raspberry pi and a rtlsdr based receiver. They do a great job picking up ADSB directly from aircraft 100+ miles away.
You'd just need to write some glue code to take the ADSB streams from a given plane (could pick based on area or strongest signal or whatever) and convert that to alt/az from your reference frame to feed the motor controllers for tracking. Your mount would clearly be adequate for optical tracking so you'd want to add some smoothing and likely some kind of tracking corrections/trim but you'd be close right off the bat.