Automatically Tracking L-Band Satellites With Hacked TV Dish & 3-D Printed Helicone Antenna

Published at : 23 Dec 2025

This is a continuation of my helicone antenna project, where I tried out a 3D printed design for L-band microwave signals (https://youtu.be/PFQ6UKulxSo). Thanks to t0nito for coming up with that design and sharing it on Thingiverse! (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436342)

In this video I stuck the helicone on one of my 2nd-hand portable TV antennas, a Winegard Carryout. I modified my earlier microwave imaging code for the Carryout (https://github.com/saveitforparts/Carryout-Radio-Telescope/). Now the antenna acts as an azimuth/elevation rotor, controllable by common software like Gpredict (https://oz9aec.dk/gpredict/).

The antenna and rotor combo work great! Aside from some cable management issues, which I hope to fix in the next iteration of this project. I was able to get nice weather data from NOAA, Meteor and Metop satellites in Low-Earth orbit.

The 3D print design from T0nito is here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436342

Check out my prior L-band tracking antenna here: https://youtu.be/8Gz17Mv7RU0

My code for this project can be found here: https://github.com/saveitforparts/Carryout-Rotor

Discord user cdavidson's improved code can be found here: https://github.com/cdavidson0522/winegard-sky-scan/

My Discord channel is: https://discord.gg/SB4bJFy3vj

Info on the serial port adapter for the Winegard dish can be found here: https://saveitforparts.wordpress.com/2023/12/29/another-portable-radio-telescope/

I used SDR++ (https://www.sdrpp.org/) and Satdump (https://www.satdump.org/) to receive and process the satellite signals.

The hardware I used included an RTL-SDR (https://amzn.to/3OPQpuw) and SAWbird+GOES (https://amzn.to/4gxGPse) (These links give me a small affiliate kickback if you buy through them!

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