QO100 dish alignment experiments

After ages I finally made a rain cover for the POTY and led cables into the garage. Big delay there because the garage was a tip. It still is a tip, but the mess has been rearranged so I have access to the air brick where the cables come in! It's nice that when they built the house in the 1930's they put an air brick right there knowing it would be needed for a satellite dish... The rain cover is made from a sheet of plastic that came out of a smashed LCD monitor. I bent it round a bit of 110mm drain pipe using a hot air gun. it didn't quite come out as intended but it's near enough. The front is from the same piece of plastic and is epoxy glued on - yes there is a gap where the glue was less gluey, I'll fix that later. Nylon threaded bar and nuts hold it in place. And it rained an hour after I made it so it does actually work. After all the messing about everything still works. There is a nice box on order to take the gubbins - ok, the Pluto, bias tee, Leo…

I finally mounted the dish. It's been cluttering up the workshop for months now. My original plan was to mount it on a pole by the workshop which would have needed a concrete base and regular trimming of the apple tree and hedge. So, it's mounted on the garage wall with a TK bracket. Aligning it wasn't too bad except I managed first to find the Astra satellite at 19.2 degrees thinking it was the one at 28.2. After I found the second one it was not too difficult to find a satellite carrying Qatar TV using the GTMedia V8. With bolts tightened a bit and after rigging all the gubbins up I found the beacon via an SDRPlay SDR and SDRUno but the levels were well down. The Pluto and SDR Console did a far better job so there will be some setting I overlooked. I copied a couple of QSOs but working outside on a Sunday with the whole estate doing gardening made it rather hard, even with headphones! Anyway, the Pluto is the one that will be used so good to see the whole RX chain working. I have some decent WF100 cable for the LNB feed…

My current issue with receiving QO100 (not got round to transmitting yet, baby steps!) is where to put the 1.2m dish. I don't really want it on the wall or at the front of the house as it's grey and huge. It can't go at the front of the workshop due to an apple tree and if it goes anywhere on the garden we'll fall over it. I'm currently thinking that the bit of land we have at the back of the garage will do and I can easily run the cables into the workshop from there, or even put all the RF side of things in the garage. But with no cable route from the garage to the shack (aka the little bedroom) it seems I will need the SDR co-mounted with the RF bits and run it via Ethernet or Wifi. Of course, there is also the wall outside the little bedroom but then we'd see it every time we gaze over at the moors... Update 11/April/20 I've worked it out. There is room at the front of the workshop to the side of the apple tree where the dish will see the sky if it's up maybe…