Having watched some fun videos on repurposed satellite dishes on YouTube, [Melan] wanted to get in on the action, managed to source an Intellian i4 — a dish built for marine use — and set about hacking it.

[Melan] first needed to convince the antenna that it was still on a boat by using an RP2040 microcontroller and an RS-422 module to send NMEA sentences. This was necessary to tell the i4 the “heading” of the “boat”, even though [Melan] was really using the rig stationary on land. From there, a simple email to the company itself sufficed to get the Intellian software running on the antenna.

But could it be controlled without the software?. Sniff the communications between the software and the Antenna Control Unit, and decompile the code. This done, it was relatively straightforward to put together a protocol description and figure out how to command the antenna where to point simply by issuing commands for azimuth and elevation.

We’ve featured other great bits of satellite equipment before, like this truck tracker teardown from a few years ago. If you’ve got some nice equipment on the bench that listens in on (or transmits out to) birds in space, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

When most radio enthusiasts start trying to pick up signals from satellites, they might put together a quick-and-dirty Yagi antenna and try to catch a repeater as is passes overhead, or they might grab a small unused dish from a satellite TV service and point it up at a weather satellite by hand to try to decode some of the data coming down. But [Cranktown City] had a different approach. He found an eight-foot dish online and built a massive articulating base station out of it as his first exploration into the world of satellites.

The first problem that needs to be solved with a dish of this size is its mounting location. This installation uses a large post and concrete foundation with a custom-fabricated metal base at the bottom. The metal base houses all of the electronics not just for receiving signals from the dish, but also for orienting it properly. That includes a large metal gear driven by a wheelchair motor to control its azimuth and a linear actuator to take care of its elevation. Getting the large dish onto the frame was its own ordeal, complicated by the fact that it’s not uniform in its shape and has to be mounted in a specific orientation.

With everything assembled, the circularly-polarized antenna installed, and the computers up and running, the dish is able to track satellites across the sky and download data from things like GOES weather satellites. [Cranktown City] also built in a system that detects wind and points the dish vertically when it goes above a certain speed. This level of effort is impressive, and absolutely not required to listen in on plenty of sattelite activity out in the sky, but this installation will certainly give [Cranktown City] a lot of mileage and possibly even work for some radio astronomy.