jvvh5897
01-06-2014, 07:31 PM
It is winter and I figured folks have some time to kill. How about a contest to build satellite dishes in your living room?
No prize, but points for low cost, simplicity of building it and how well it works.
I figure couple of categories. C band and ku band. Structural--where you design all the elements. Casting--where you use existing elements in your design like taking a casting off of the front of a TV picture tube or big balloon or use spinning liquid to form parabolic shape--things like that. Stress dishes--see Katz's stress dish for an example of how to use bent beams, or read the pdf
http://ashokk_3.tripod.com/srinivasan.htm on making a sheet bend into a reflector (not that good a method though).
The structural methods might be interesting--maybe more like modern sculpture than anything else, but think of how computers tile surfaces now days and how one might apply that to making a modular dish (see the hexplanet demo
http://vickijoel.org/hexplanet/. Or how telescopes use many small mirrors rather than one big one.
Casting could be with fiberglass or paper mache--you could explore how to weather proof it with thinned out latex caulking or roofing paint like they do cardboard canoes. And how well can metallic paint act as reflector?
Maybe a found objects category. The other day I walked past an auto body repair shop and next to the recycle dumpster there was the hood off a car that looked an awful lot like it could work as a dish--maybe a few cables to pull it more into shape using the stress dish idea?
Cheap things like cardboard, AL foil, space blankets, using an old 18 inch dish as the basis of the dish but with longer LNB arm and big reflector. Do you do prime focus or offset, rectangular or circular or elliptical or spherical or...
No prize, but points for low cost, simplicity of building it and how well it works.
I figure couple of categories. C band and ku band. Structural--where you design all the elements. Casting--where you use existing elements in your design like taking a casting off of the front of a TV picture tube or big balloon or use spinning liquid to form parabolic shape--things like that. Stress dishes--see Katz's stress dish for an example of how to use bent beams, or read the pdf
http://ashokk_3.tripod.com/srinivasan.htm on making a sheet bend into a reflector (not that good a method though).
The structural methods might be interesting--maybe more like modern sculpture than anything else, but think of how computers tile surfaces now days and how one might apply that to making a modular dish (see the hexplanet demo
http://vickijoel.org/hexplanet/. Or how telescopes use many small mirrors rather than one big one.
Casting could be with fiberglass or paper mache--you could explore how to weather proof it with thinned out latex caulking or roofing paint like they do cardboard canoes. And how well can metallic paint act as reflector?
Maybe a found objects category. The other day I walked past an auto body repair shop and next to the recycle dumpster there was the hood off a car that looked an awful lot like it could work as a dish--maybe a few cables to pull it more into shape using the stress dish idea?
Cheap things like cardboard, AL foil, space blankets, using an old 18 inch dish as the basis of the dish but with longer LNB arm and big reflector. Do you do prime focus or offset, rectangular or circular or elliptical or spherical or...