John Wilcox / NS1Z wrote:

I don't think this statement is true. For very low wind speeds you might be right. However, once the wind reaches a certain speed (one which would exert moderate force) the mesh dish no longer will pass the wind thru the small openings of the mesh. Due to surface turbulance etc the mesh dish would appear to be solid and no air would be passing thru it.

Wayne replies:

I built my Teksharp 4-foot dish kit with 1/4 inch hardware cloth which is 80-90% holes. Other people estimated that it has about half the windload of a solid dish in a very high wind, which would be slightly less than the wind load of a 3-foot dish. Anecdotally, people have reported that it's still extremely windy when they stand downwind of the dish in a gale force wind. The dish would behave more "solid" in high winds if it was built with window screen or perforated metal instead of hardware cloth.

If the surface holes are larger (than the typical C/Ku dish) then the air once again can pass thru at a higher wind speed. However, this limits the dish usefulness since increased diameter surface holes lower the useable frequency of the dish, something about a waveguide beyond cutoff.

The Teksharp dish isn't intended for higher microwave frequencies because of the 8-petal design isn't a precise parabola. And of course at higher frequencies you would need a finer mesh than 1/4 inch hardware cloth. I wonder if the 4-foot Teksharp 8-petal dish can match the gain of a perfectly shaped 2-foot dish at 5 or 10 GHz? That would still be a lot of gain.

Wayne Estes W9AE Oakland, Oregon, USA, CN83ik