Re: [amsat-bb] c-band TVRO dishes for AO-40

[Bruce Nolte N3LSY <brucenol@xxxxxxx>]

You can get **excellent** results with an old C-Band TVRO dish on AO-40,
and as soon as I get the new house built I have a dish waiting to go. A
couple of things to note however, first is that you will need to
"enhance" the range of motion of the equatorial mount, since AO-40's
orbit moves across the equator a few degrees to either side. A couple of
schemes I have thought of are to use a second actuator to move the dish
up and down in the X-Y axis, or perhaps a cordless drill motor to run
the adjusting screws up and down. A second consideration is that you may
want to "detune" the feedpoint a bit, since a large dish will tend to
peak very sharply on the signal. 

The L-band uplink feed should not pose a problem, just mount it next to
whatever type of feed you want to use for the downlink. With a little
work and ingenuity, you will have armchair copy on AO-40 in no time at
all, and make us 1 meter dish guys jealous :o).  

James Sharp wrote:
> 
> The new house I've just moved into has a nice 10 foot TVRO dish in the backyard.  I've heard of people using them for AO-40 work...Is it just as simple as putting a downconverter with a 2-3 turn helix feed on it at the focal point of the dish?
> 
> What about for the L-Band uplink?  Can I just put an L-Band feed in that area too and use it for the uplink?
> 
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