Thanks to all our supporters, Discovery Dish is now out in the community, and we have seen you all doing great things with it! Below is a highlight reel of all the reviews and use-cases we’ve seen our customers sharing online.

First up, we have this excellent review from the popular ‘saveitforparts’ YouTube channel. In the review Gabe unboxes the Discovery Dish, builds it, and uses the L-band feed to receive a few images from GOES 16, Meteor M3, Meteor M4, and METOP weather satellites. He goes on to successfully test reception with the S-band feeds on NOAA weather satellites, before testing out the Inmarsat feed and successfully receiving signals.

Next, we have a review by ‘thebaldgeek’ who posted his review in the Airframes community forum. In his post, thebaldgeek unboxes the dish and feed boxes, showing all the individual parts. He goes on to bolt the dish together and show it fully built. In the rest of the post, he compares the Discovery Dish with Inmarsat feed against three other options, including a GPS puck, an RTL-SDR Blog Active Patch Antenna, and a homemade 7-turn helis that what those Twitter links are supposed to be attribution?x antenna.

As expected, the Discovery Dish performs the best, with the 7-turn helix coming in second, followed by the RTL-SDR Blog Patch, and finally, the GPS patch. He rightly notes that the dish does have increased wind loading over the other options, and this needs to be taken into account when positioning and mounting.

Next is an article from Stephan Cass, writing for IEEE Spectrum magazine. His article shows how he set up Discovery Dish on the roof of his New York City apartment building and received images from GOES, as well as observe the Hydrogen line peak.

Over on X, we’ve seen several posts from IndianRocketGirl (@VU3BIZ) who has been using her Discovery Dish to receive various satellites.

• https://x.com/VU3BIZ/status/1896205293647978954
• https://x.com/VU3BIZ/status/1895860476288123365
• https://x.com/VU3BIZ/status/1906882898101215502

On X, Eelke Visser (@eelkevisser) has been using Discovery Dish with the S-band feed for a unique use case. The dish was used to receive signals from the Firefly Space Blue Ghost moon lander with Discovery Dish. He was able to observe the Doppler shift as it orbited the moon.

• https://x.com/eelkevisser/status/1892145724663513127
• https://x.com/eelkevisser/status/1895907953926160882

Eelke was also able to receive and observe the Doppler shift of the Intuitive Machines lander as it landed on the surface of the moon:

• https://x.com/eelkevisser/status/1895539650028253445
• https://x.com/eelkevisser/status/1897708138846937538

Over on Jeff’s CTO Laboratory YouTube channel, Jeff has been showing how to add a Discovery Dish to a homelab setup.

On X @nishikaxu_nkc has been posting her results, showing off multiple beautiful images from NOAA, Meteor, and METOP polar orbiting satellites from which she’s received images.

• https://x.com/nishikazu_nkc/status/1891106164458287282
• https://x.com/nishikazu_nkc/status/1889310880921538582
• https://x.com/nishikazu_nkc/status/1889280572461072479

On X @BenSKlerk1 has been posting nearly daily images of Elektro L4, Meteor, NOAA and Metop images that he’s been receiving with the Discovery Dish.

• https://x.com/BenSKlerk1/status/1907344477725057349
• https://x.com/BenSKlerk1/status/1906974257613324752
• https://x.com/BenSKlerk1/status/1906883134265962507
• https://x.com/BenSKlerk1/status/1905435975540768998

On X @F0DEI has uploaded some images of a homebrew helix feed that he’s been using with the Discovery Dish.

• https://x.com/F0DEI/status/1906916658930696314

Finally, over on X @cemaxecuter has been building a Discovery Dish outdoor station with a custom electronics enclosure.

• https://x.com/cemaxecuter/status/1897067308599931168

If you are interested, some community members have also created an unofficial Reddit forum to discuss Discovery Dish over at https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoveryDish/

Stock Updates

Our first batch of Discovery Dish feeds has been totally sold out. The second batch is currently under production with an estimated completion date of about a month, and arrival at the Mouser warehouses in late May/early June. From the second batch onwards we hope to be able to maintain consistent stock levels to meet the high demand for Discovery Dish!

Rotator Updates

First, we want to acknowledge that we are a bit behind on releasing the rotator, but we are getting very close to the crowdfunding stage! The design is nearly finalized, and we are just making some small tweaks. However, designing the rotator is a slow process because each tweak needs to be tested at a high duty cycle for at least several weeks to ensure long-term stability.

The pricing of the rotator will be a little higher than what was initially mentioned back in the early days of the Discovery Dish crowdfunding campaign, but it will still be competitively priced compared to the other options out there. Since the early days of the Discovery Dish campaign, the rotator design has changed to make it significantly more robust, and it now has the ability to carry slightly heavier dishes, such as WiFi grid dishes.

Wiki Reminder

We wanted to remind everyone that we have a Discovery Dish Wiki available at https://github.com/krakenrf/discoverydish_docs/wiki. This guide will help you get started with Discovery Dish, satellite reception and related software.