Hacking Portable Satellite Dish For More Space Experiments

This was a project to modify a Winegard Carryout satellite antenna into a microwave imager and miniature radio telescope. It’s similar to my prior project with a Dish Tailgater antenna ( I used a string of serial cable adapters to get a console on the Carryout dish brain, then I could control it with a Python program. The dish moves through a specified angle and elevation range and takes a signal reading at each position. These can be combined into an image of the sky where each pixel is a radio signal. Then you can “see“ things like satellites and radiation patterns. The prior version only used the onboard Ku-band receiver on the dish. This version replaces the LNB with an RTL-SDR (Software-defined radio) and L-band antenna. Other radio bands could be used, but microwave probably works the best. I’d like to turn this into a Wifi imager eventually. I did some brief experiments with Wifi (S-band) using a downconverter, but I didn’t get very far with that. My best images so far include an Inmarsat geostationary satellite, navigation satellites, and Iridium comm satellites. All of these can be “imaged“ with the dish, although they appear a little different due to the relative speed of the dish and the satellite! For example, Iridium showed up as one long streak (kind of like a time exposure picture). GPS / Gallileo / Beidou showed up as many small points on an orbital track. Inmarsat showed up as fixed a point source in the sky. I have a writeup on my website with more information about this project here: My code is available on Github here: You will need an RS-232 to RS-485 adapter. I used this one: Used satellite antennas like this often show up on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and other used sites. They’re worth about $25-$50USD. Sometimes people ask more, but I just wait until they go unsold for a month and the price drops, or wait for someone else to list one cheaper. Saveitforparts t-shirts and other merch at Join this channel to get access to perks: Or support me via Patreon at Check out gadgets and devices I like at