Re: [amsat-bb] Lock on Tracking

[Bruce Bostwick <lihan161051@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I did much the same thing to align a C-band TVRO dish to a GEO bird on 
the roof of a building on the local university campus one time.  It had 
the useful feature that the arm the feed was on was a little flexible 
(OK, it was a cheap patio dish, not the best in the world but it worked 
..) and I could bend the arm an inch or so up/down and left/right to 
see which direction I was off and by approximately how much, and once I 
got the elevation right, I could adjust the azimuth by carefully 
calibrated kicks against the frame to get it right on target.

I'll have to save the story of the phone calls to the building office 
about the crazy guy up there kicking their satellite dish for later ..

On Wednesday, Dec 11, 2002, at 09:19 US/Central, Rod Smallwood wrote:

> Hi
>   Well if we look only at AO40 for now it moves
> fairly slowly. I have my 5 foot dish dismanteled
> at the moment for the addition of motors. I used
> to point it by hand with a long lead to a pair of
> headphones for the FT847 to peak for max signal .
> I would get about 10-15mins of S5-6 beacon each time.
> What I did was to look for the nulls either side
> of the main signal and set the dish on the leading
> down slope. This ment that it ran through the peak
> and down the other side before I needed to reset it.
> Not a wonderful method but it worked.
>
> I would try the same thing to track it. Say peak it
> up then run off left/rightand up/down to find the four
> nulls and estimate from there.
>
> Rod G8DGR

"Go ahead and do it, you can apologize later." -- RADM Grace Hopper, 
1906-1992
"The sunset is an illusion, but the beauty is real." -- Richard Bach

----
Via the amsat-bb mailing list at AMSAT.ORG courtesy of AMSAT-NA.
To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe amsat-bb" to Majordomo@amsat.org