our school has an old five to seven foot SATV dish. Question: is there a market for it? otherwise, it is dumpster bound.
I just found a bashed up 3 meter dish and only 1/4th of it, or one quadrant was still in good shape. I then realized that being only 4 feet across, it would make a much more manageable 802.11 "S" band dish for terrestrial work.!
Keep the feed point at the same place, but you can still throw away 1/4th, 1/2 or 3/4ths of the original dish and only use what is convenient. In this case, only the 1/4th quadrant. Put your "S" band feed at the same old focal point but pointed at the center of what's left and now you have a perfectly good 4 foot or so OFFSET FEED large "S" band dish. And a cute thing is that it LOOKS like it is looking up at satellites (because of the top mounted offset feed) when in fact, it is now looking horizontal.
So the fu ll size dish is nice, but usually too big to be manageable. But 1/4th of it still makes a great "S" band system...
de WB4APR, Bob