The Discovery Dish Project is for weather satellite reception and hydrogen line radio astronomy. The Crowd Supply Project has raised over $100,000 USD. Project is based in Portland, OR https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/discovery-dish
The Discovery Dish is a 70-cm aluminum satellite dish with an active filtered feed. It is designed for receiving real-time weather data from GOES HRIT, GK-2A LRIT, FengYun LRIT, NOAA HRPT, Metop HRPT, Meteor M2 HRPT, and other weather satellites that operate around 1.69 GHz.
Today’s Update (2 October, 2004) notes that shipping of initial orders will begin. https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/discovery-dish/updates/shipping-out-soo... ** Of interest to AMSAT members is their upcoming Rotator Product for tracking satellites.
Discovery Dish Rotator product, will be used for automatically aiming and tracking Discovery Dish (and other lightweight dishes) towards orbiting satellites.
A Rotator Prototype (photo) and a screenshot of the current web interface can be seen in the October 2 update. https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/discovery-dish/updates/shipping-out-soo...
They have been working on the software and controller board for the rotator. The controller board is based on an ESP32 microcontroller. With the ESP32, it is possible to implement the rotctl protocol over WiFi as well as serial. So this means the rotator can be controlled directly over WiFi with rotctl compatible software like SatDump and Gpredict. They are also in the process of creating a web interface for manual control and status information.
Unlike similar rotators, their rotator system uses brushless DC motors instead of stepper motors, and uses feedback control via hall effect sensors on the shaft instead of feed-forward control via the steppers. They are aiming to achieve rotational speeds of 1 RPM in full power mode. Follow their Project for future Updates. ===
greg w9gb