As can be seen, its mostly about dimensions and holes, hence simple enough for production.The basic idea is to build a custom low-cost and mobile rotator for satellite tracking and pointing a parabolic dish for C-band communication with a satellite.The focus of this write-up is on the embedded systems part of the project.
The bottom line is to have a simple cost-effective solution that is also mobile in the sense that it can be loaded onto a carmini-truck to wherever the tracking of a satellite may be necessary. At my current institution ( Kyutech ), there is an industrial-grade S-band ground station that is shown in the cover image. Parabolic Dish Antenna Design Software Portable Version OfThe idea is to build a portable version of it for a small-sized dish. This is part of a larger satellite project whose details are not necessary here. A high-level block diagram of the design is shown in the figure below. Luckily, a couple of amateur radio operators have designed their own antenna rotators such as the work of Tom Doyle that provided me with a starting point concept. Nevertheless, most of these designs are for VHFUHF Yagi beam antennas as opposed to parabolic dishes. Hence the rotator would need to be robust enough to handle such weight but simple enough to build and meet the low-cost objective. It also had to be a cheap and simple option since it is just a small (but critical) part of the whole mobile ground station. I spent quite a while looking at diverse options to meet the above requirements and finally found a perfect match. It has greased ball-bearings that make its rotation under load extremely smooth. I settled on these angle bars from a local Nafco hardware section. They are cheap enough and allow for flexibility in the design. One of the greatest advantages of our times is in the amount of information resources and tools available on the internet. If properly utilized, an individual can achieve much more within a remarkably short time compared to yesteryears. Parabolic Dish Antenna Design Software Software Since ItI settled on the Autodesk Fusion 360 CAD software since it is free for educational purposes. More so, there are a couple of tutorials available on its use. Within a week or so, I had mastered the general flow of designing on the software and I commenced working on the rotator design. However, here the support structure had not yet been identified i.e. It was more of a concept design than an assembly ready design. The images below show an assembly ready CAD design for the basic rotor structure design.
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