Cyberex CN-7500 Folding C-Band Satellite Dish & Free NASA TV
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ส.ค. 2024
- Recently I traded some of my portable satellite dishes for this 1980s version! It's a Cyberex CN-7500, approximately 7.5ft diameter, made of reflective mesh or netting with fiberglass ribs. It folds up much like an umbrella, so you can store it out of the way when not in use, or potentially take it on the road.
While there aren't as many satellites still using C-band, you can find NASA TV feeds and a few other free television channels out there. It took some fiddling to get the dish aligned just right, there are a lot of variables like LNB skew and focal point in addition to the normal azimuth and elevation. I was also somewhat limited in which satellites I could aim at, since winter has left my yard half blocked with a giant snow pile.
I'm looking forward to trying more experiments with this in the future. I have some ideas for more weather satellite and NOAA data downloads, radio astronomy, ham radio stuff, etc. It's a really nice addition to my growing pile of obsolete radio and space hardware!
Saveitforparts t-shirts and other merch at my-store-b88bcf.creator-sprin...
Join this channel to get access to perks:
/ @saveitforparts
Or support me via Patreon at / saveitforparts - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![เบิ้ล ปทุมราช - อ้ายกินดอง น้องลาบงัว ft. สแน็ก อัจฉรีย์ [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-OK--KaSPcI/mqdefault.jpg)
I am not an expert or even a radio hobbyist but I found your videos interesting and genuine.
I'm not an expert either, I'm just curious about what I can do with all the weird junk I hoard!
@@saveitforparts Fascinated too!
I'm curious where can I learn about these materials being from a physics background?
Hooked on these aswell. Cheers from funland.
Same reason I am here! Great stuff!
I designed and built one at the company I worked for, some 50 years ago - for the 'free' TV broadcasts. The dish I made, was 16' in diameter, parabolic, metal mesh. At that time, they were FM analog signals, and not encrypted. Good times. The best available LNB had a 110'K noise figure, which is a FAR cry from today's Ku band LNBs.
Is it possible to share such a design? Hard to get large dishes these days.
Actually, 110K is only about 30-40K worse than what is achieved at C-band and Ku-band these days. The advertised noise figures are complete nonsense, and each vendor tries to "one up" the other on noise figure, because consumers have no idea how to measure it. But if you, like me, have the necessary knowledge, experienced, and equipment, it's not hard to see that these '10K noise temperature" LNAs aren't doing anywhere near that well. I'm a radio astronomer. I actually care about these things...
You right, Gardiner was something great. 0,8 is true 0,8 NF
you can tell this guy loves what he is doing, he has a constant smile on his face, you dont see that much now-a-days
Awesome sat dish.
If that mountan of snow aint comming closer....
You have to bring that satellite dish to the mountain!
10:26 OMG I love that screen saver! When I was a kid I used to pretend I was flying through space on our family computer when the screen saver was on!
I remember bumping the mouse and accidentally turning off my favorite screen saver. Good times
This brings back memories l installed sat dishes for 11 years in the high desert of California. I would love to have mine back. I had a 10 ft Orbitron. With a General Instermints 2650 it was top of the line with a 25 degree LNB you had the Cadillac of sat systems
Put it on the snow bank. You are doing a great job man. Thanks for all of this.
Oh how the world does change, I had a C band dish back in the wild west days of the 1980's, and now I am watching you play with one on a youtube video that I am watching over a Starlink internet connection.
I picked one of these up years ago for free and have still have yet to use it. Thanks for showing me that they still work.
I remember my dad's buddy using one of these at the hunting shack when I was like 8 or 9. Everyone was very excited and not much hunting got done that season 😂😂
Ha, that's great!
I sincerly love your smile! Your passion shows through and makes your videos really awesome!
I know next to nothing about electronics/radio, but your videos have forced me to study the myriad of terms you so glibly(?) toss out and since I want to understand in a very rudimentary way what you are discussing, I continue the slog. The main reason you are so engaging is your obvious love of your subject. I am not an electrical engineer as I suspect you are, but I live in the mechanical side of things. When you make something out of nothing, I am right there with you! I wish you the best in your endeavors and wish you good health and a joyful journey. By the way, in my opinion, you are about the most well-adjusted young man I have ever encountered...from the bits I can pick up on. Cheers, sir, from the hills of Virginia! Cork
Sorry about all the acronyms and whatnot. I definitely didn't know most of this stuff until recently, and I had to try a lot of things to understand what they meant and how they worked.
8:23 so it's either a failing lithium battery, or perhaps an undersized one. Either way, it's upgrade time! (spin off video idea maybe?)
You need to get a lot of cinder blocks and put them on each of the four base arms and put cinder blocks on top of the cinder blocks to hold the dish down
The wind load against the dish is over a thousand pounds and it will flip right over
Yep, it's definitely not made for windy environments, and not supposed to be left deployed for long periods. It came with some big tent stakes to pound into the ground, but I think the dish itself would get damaged by gusts even if it didn't blow away.
Man, I've been looking forever for a reasonably priced traditional c-band dish and here I find out that portable folding units were produced.
That is quite a rare find indeed, as doing a web search for that sku reveals practically no information. Man what I wouldn't give for one of those dishes. 73 de W8IJC
I had no idea they existed until someone contacted me and offered to trade. It's one of those things that was probably silly and impractical for its intended use even when new, because who wants to pack that along on a vacation? However, it should be great for experimenting!
Go search in the right part of town that has houses from the right era. Go knock on the door of any house that still has a c-band dish. Usually they can be had for free if you offer to "make it go away". The portable dish has a lot of novelty, but a 10' mesh, or better yet 12' fiberglass dish (even moreso if you can find a commercial 12' or bigger fiberglass dish) will blow this thing out of the water performance-wise!
Yep, I got the aluminum mesh one from a house that wanted it to go away. The LNB was full of wasps, so that was... fun...
Someone sent me a link to the modern version of these folding dishes for sale: www.sub-lunar.com
Wouldn't of thought anybody would be still into these big dishes.
Neighbor has a big one that hasn't been used in long long time.
Look! I can see my house! It's right there.keep doin what no one wants, very informative 😊
Really enjoying all your content! Keepem coming!
I'm surprised they didn't name it the "Peacock" for obvious resemblance reasons, LOL. That was cool you got the NASA feed! Cool tech, nice vid. :)
Really cool. I enjoyed watching this. Looking forward for the next video. Keep up the good work!
That is a pretty wicked looking dish. Like the kind James Bond would take camping or something.
Can’t wait to see you with that in the summer. That’s gonna be awesome
Really really enjoy your videos! Keep up the great work and thanks!
Glad this worked out for you. Thanks for sharing 👌
That's a cool antenna, I also use the good V8 satellite meter. The video was interesting, I didn't even know that NASA broadcasts TV via satellite.
That was really cool.
I audibly cheered when the NASA video came up.
☮
Lol seems like a really hard way to do stuff you can watch for free on youtube, and yet, really cool at the same time.
Nice job getting it all working!
OMG! LOL! Your "stuff" pile looks like mine! Awesome! Someone else who patrols the digital scrapyard! Love your efforts to show the usefulness of the old "cutting edge" tech!
Galaxy 13. This brings back so much memories of my childhood and the satellite dish we had.
That thing reminds me so much of the umbrella E.T. used to phone home.
Im about to choose my career and the way youre relaxed and doing projects just made me feel about following interests man, thanks.
Sometimes you don't know where a career will go, I didn't end up working in the same field I went to school for. I also enjoy personal projects more than school or work projects since there's generally no deadline and I can choose how I do it. I've also heard that turning a hobby into a job can make it less fun, but it probably varies by person!
@@saveitforparts word.
Ohh that would make a brilliant directional wifi antenna with a few mods lol. Cool video
I remember the days of Pringles cans, lol.
This may be my new favorite channel. I wanted to grab the old mini dish off our deck before our landlord threw it to try to grab train transponder signals and use SDR to decode them and track when BNSF trains go by us. Also hello from La Crosse :)
Oh. I would love one of these
Looks a lot like the one that they used on the surface of the moon for Apollo television transmissions during EVAs.
When I was in the military playing with Harris and antenas I felt like I know everything. I found Your channel and understood that I understand shit.
don't let the snow melt! put the dish on the snow hill.! :D
I just love your channel!
I have not seen one of those in a minute. We used to set those up as demo's for potential customers. Very rural area and needless to say a lot of people were skeptical. Eventually we stopped and just assembled a dish on a 4' concrete pad that we could slide on and off a trailer. It was a rare day when we would have to retrieve a dish. Especially before anything was scrambled. I don't remember exactly what we paid for ours... but I remember it being more than a solid 8' fiberglass dish.
Oh wow... look at that! You even have the old school "tracker" boxes for those customers that upgraded to electric dish positioning instead of the manual screw jack.
4:05 That absolutely can be fixed. Minor stuff for a weld shop.
amazing satelite dish ❤
I dont know if you remember the late Robert Luly?I worked for satellite supply in north miami beach in the 1980's,We had the first luly portable antenna a flexible mesh was gold plated,We also had the first 8 ball antenna made out of 1x2 furring strip,.I still have a couple of Luly Spectrum analyzers
Also doubles as a cute parasol when held upside down
How neat is that!
Brilliant, your channel just popped up, glad I checked it out. Really interesting. That reminded me of being a kid trying to capture MTV over Sat in the late 80's !
When I lived in Alaska we had one of the big C-band dishes. We normally got Alaska PBS, but we could get MTV2 if we went and pushed it to the side a little bit. In the 90s that one had all the music videos that MTV used to have. Now I think both channels are just reality shows.
@@saveitforparts Agree, dont watch them now. Hey, being from the UK MTV back then was some mystical TV channel ;) Keep up the good work. Have enjoyed your other content!
The dish is cool it reminds me of the older 007 movies.
This is not just a C-band dish , you could receive Ku-band frequencies with it too and it'll work very well with satellites that have low coverage in your area
Here in middle east we have many Ku and C-band satellite channels, i can receive with my 140cm more than 36 satellite with thousands of channels
I have a few other feedhorns and LNBs I want to try with this. We don't have as many free satellite channels in North America but I could use it for weather satellites too.
Reminds me of an antenna from a movie Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. I checked, in the film the antenna was much smaller, and maybe not even real judging by the shape, rather it was created so compact for the stage.
That dish antenna was invented by Bob Luly in the early 1980s.
Wondered if anybody would bring Bob Luly. I have one of Luly's antennas and every now and then bring it out to show some history. I made sat receivers back in the early 80's under the Sat-tec and Prostar names. Sold tens of thousands of them!
@@jgramsey John, I remember you well. I met you around 1981 at an early TVRO show in Anaheim, CA. You also gave a lecture on satellite receivers and demodulators. I remember asking you about how a delay line demod worked. You had designed many products and it's too bad that there's fewer hobbyists nowadays.
Fun video. I still have a 10ft C band Bud running. All I can say is you may be surprised what a slight adjustment on your feed focal depth and skew can do. Make sure your f/d setting on your feedhorn is correct. Just play with it and see how strong you can peak your signal.
THANK YOU, I really enjoy this content😎😎
That looks like a drake Earth station receiver that you have there, if I recall correctly those have a 70 megahertz IF frequency, and used an LNA or low noise amplifier connected to a block down converter that sends a 70 megahertz signal to the receiver.
I had to look up which of my obsolete gadgets you meant, but yes I think there's one of those in the Ax-Man surplus pile. I haven't looked at that stuff too closely yet, it's just cluttering up my workbench right now.
@@saveitforparts with a power injector and an SDR tuned to that 70 MHz frequency would also give you an option however some of those receivers sent a variable tuning voltage to the block down converter and also had a stepper motor polar rotor for fine-tuning your skew, as you can imagine the variable voltage tuning units were highly susceptible to drift during that era, however with more accurate variable voltage supplies nowadays you could probably make it quite stable
That thing would be great for radio astronomy.
I need to figure out some motors and a mount for it (or for the rigid one). I have some of the old 24V actuators but they're pretty rusty.
@@saveitforparts you static mount it. Point at one point in the sky. Measure the hydrogen line and as the earth moves it will pick up objects as it passes the antenna.
I love your satellite content
Always wanted one of those.
If all else fails, you could take that fabric from the satellite, and stich together a classic "Foot Clan" costume from the 1980s TMNT movie...
I've had one of those dishes since the '80's and never used it! LOL
They're pretty fun! I can see it being useful for ham stuff and weather satellite stuff as well as boring old TV.
excelente trabajo saludos desde Colombia muy interesante
This was great! Loved seeing it open out. I noticed you were only getting horizontal polarisation so maybe something was wrong with the skew you were describing, as the lnb will probably contain a horizontal antenna and a vertical one. I know if you try again and work hard at it you will get nasa tv coming in loud and clear. I don't think it's just the snow causing issues, you just need to get it exactly on the satellite and there's plenty of room for fine adjustments on your dish.
9:40 put the antenna ON TOP OF THE SNOW PILE!!! OMG!
Pretty neat! Had no idea there was anything still on C-Band!!!
There's TONS of stuff still on cband - most cable channels are still distributed from the broadcaster to the cable companies by c-band (though some have gone to fiber or IP delivery now)
Hey 👋!!! I love ❤️ the dish…Now what you need is my old new stock C band receiver with descrambler and new low c feed horn….
Nice dish
Hah it really does look like something out of some 70s Sci-Fi. Cool project.
Thats the coolest portable satellite i've ever seen! You Americans have all the fun toy's!
This is all new to me but very interesting
hmmm, guess ill be starting my radio telescope project back up
I can't wait to see more of this :O
It's giving Edward Scissorhands if he needed a portable satellite dish
the GOES series are really cool stuff for weather nerds.....
Yes! I've done a little bit with those satellites, I want to set up one of my dishes as a more permanent downlink. Sure I could get it all online, but it's more fun to get it straight off the satellite and beautify my roof with more antennas 😂
Sweet 30 years ago !
Thats awesome. I'd love to play with something like that
that thing is pretty cool
I’d love that!
The TH-cam rabbit hole brought me to this channel. Guys like this are who you need to know when SHTF. I’m a McGyver type of guy who is self taught and can fix about anything. But this is something I have never dabbled in but can’t argue with this guys methods and results. Cool video man.
I installed a ton of c- band stuff in the 80's. Nice food up dish. The tracker 4 satellite control was the nicest one they came out with. Toshiba trx series receivers drake esr 240 324 all good for parts now.. Nice pile of old relics. Brings back a lot of memories. Great video.
A hoter LNB. The last one I got was 100º but that was a 30 years ago.
First time I see something like this 🤔😆
been looking for one of these. im in RV living so portable is a must.
They seem to be available here but I'm not sure of the price: sub-lunar.com/products
Otherwise the little RV domes for Dish network / DirecTV show up on Craigslist and Facebook for ~$50-$100 sometimes.
@@saveitforparts will the small ones do fta? I dont see them doing c band....
It’s hard for me to impress the girls these days this channel gives me hope
I’ve got a big stainless steel 10 foot dish wanted to make a solar oven out of it
Very .. Very cool ...reminds me of the old movie umbrella size military satellite phones 😅
Well, actually the live feed from ISS came to you twice from space haha. ISS *most of the time, uplinked comm to TDRS system in the geosychronous orbit where it would beamed back to Earth ground station (because ISS is traveling around the world and lessons learned from the Skylab that using a bunch of airborne receiving station isn't the most efficient way to communicate to an orbiting storage station). Then it'd be beamed back to TV satellite where you then would received it 😂
On a sunny day you can put an aluminum tape cross on the dish surface and use the sun's reflection to find the focal point.
It would be really funny to place a dish tailgator hidden in the roof and replace the antenna with a long range wifi antenna and hack wifis and just use the motor to find them. Also it would be interresting if it could be used for point to point long range. Sadly nothing like that is or to my knowledge have been available in and around denmark. I would do somthing like that
Ax Man!!!! I haven't been there since 2019!
Sounds like you need to make a return trip!
Worst umbrella ever! 😂
Very cool. 👍
Yea, pretty cool in the snowbank...
Those old analog receivers aren't going to be of much (if any) use anymore, as i think just about everything has gone digital, now. The Drake isn't even LNB compatible; it's from the LNA days.
Neat videos
I want you to know I just subscribed based on your channel name alone haha.
Those programs stations that looks like the back hall for The weather Channel
Imagine the large one as a cathedral ceiling somewhere in Sand Land, heh heh. Like you don't have enough going on. :p
Cool!👏👏👍
Thats realy cool. I would love to have u as a neigbour
No Comment’s - Great 👍🏼 Job …..
Hi 👋 from Chertanovo Chopper’s Custom Club …..
Moscow City 🌆 …..
Russia 🇷🇺 …..
cool af. subbed
It has got to be bad luck opening that inside. :)
That 1700 MHz is the LO freq of the output of the LNB, not the receive freq.
That thing is so sick looking. I want one. May have to figure out how to scratch build one...
Someone just sent me a link to a modern version, no prices listed though: sub-lunar.com/products
Never knew there were portable C Band satellite dishes. I only know and tested portable Ku Band satellite dishes, a dish has the size between 40 - 60 cm. I recommend you a C & Ku Band LNB, so you can receive more FTA channels on both bands. For example Galaxy 97 West has FTA channels on both C and Ku Band, you can test your dish on that satellite.
P.S. I don' t understand why TH-cam deletes all my comments.
This one came though! I notice TH-cam deletes anything with a link, and sometimes stuff just disappears (I'll see it in the notifications but then it's gone when I click on it). Not sure what the deal is.
I have a variety pack of LNBs and feedhorns, I might also stick my cantenna for weather satellites on there. I've played with some of the portable KU band dishes and have some videos on those too.
@@saveitforparts There are two youtubers: Robbie Strike and Northcoaster Hobby" they explain everything you want to know about FTA (free to air) satellite reception.
In your case buy a C&Ku Band LNB. Some satellites broadcast TV and radio channels on both bands and you can receive them with a single C Band dish. You also need a DiseqC switch. The switch allows you to connect 2 up to 10 LNBs and have all signals on one cable. From you receiver menu you program the switch make sure the satellite is on the correct input otherwise you have no signal.
I have 5 years experience in Ku Band satellite and OTA TV and FM reception.
Also NASA TV HD and NASA UHD can be received in Europe on HotBird 13 East satellite. FTA, too bad cable companies don't want to rebroadcast the channels so you have to install a satellite dish if you want to watch them.