In this update we want to provide some updates on the shipping status of Discovery Dish, our Discovery Dish Wiki and some updates on the rotator project.

Discovery Dish Shipping

At this moment the goods are being packed into their shipping boxes; however, due to the Chinese National Day holidays, we won’t be able to ship to the Mouser warehouse until October 10. Due to the bulk nature of the dishes, most of the goods will be shipped by sea freight to the USA, which should take about 3-4 weeks. This means that the goods will probably start shipping out to customers around early to mid-November.

This is our first time dealing with larger bulk products, so unfortunately the time it took to figure out the logistics of creating the shipping boxes and packing everything well exceeded our initial estimates, so we are a few extra weeks delayed. Again, we want to thank everyone for their patience. There have been several delays in getting this product to backers, but we’re almost at the shipping stage, so please hang in there! Also, please don’t forget to double check your shipping address in your Crowd Supply account.

Below are a few images that show the packaging of the Feed set:

And the Dish and Mount set:

New Manuals

We have also created two new paper manuals that will be included with the products. One for the Feed set, and one for the Dish and Mount set. In a previous update, we also showed the enclosure manual. All paper manuals can now be found on our Discovery Dish GitHub docs repo https://github.com/krakenrf/discoverydish_docs

We are now also in the process of adding to our Discovery Dish Wiki at https://github.com/krakenrf/discoverydish_docs/wiki/ which will show various tutorials on ways to use the dish. For example, via SatDump (L-band and S-band Satellites), or via SDR# and the IF Average Plugin (Hydrogen Line), or via Tekmanoid and JAERO for STD-C and AERO decoding. The Wiki is currently a work in process, but we are making the effort to have it fully completed by the time customers receive their Discovery Dish products.

Rotator Updates

We are continuing to work on the Discovery Dish Rotator product, which will be used for automatically aiming and tracking Discovery Dish (and other dishes) towards orbiting satellites.

Below is an image of our first prototype from the factory. We are still working on changing a number of things and reducing the overall weight, so this image may not be indicative of the final product.

We have also been working on the software and controller board for the rotator. The controller board is based on an ESP32 microcontroller. With the ESP32, it is possible to implement the rotctl protocol over WiFi as well as serial. So this means the rotator can be controlled directly over WiFi with rotctl compatible software like SatDump and Gpredict. We are also in the process of creating a web interface for manual control and status information. A screenshot of the current web interface is shown below:

Unlike similar rotators, our rotator makes use of brushless DC motors instead of stepper motors, and we use feedback control via hall effect sensors on the shaft instead of feed-forward control via the steppers. We are aiming to achieve rotational speeds of 1 RPM in full power mode and 0.5 RPM in restricted power mode. Restricted power mode will be required when powering the rotator via a POE+ 803.11at 25 W supply. (Note that the POE supply is separate from the rotator and provided by the user. The rotator itself is powered by a 12 V DC barrel jack or a USB-C PD supply). Both rotational speeds are more than sufficient to track almost every satellite in the sky, including the ISS which is one of the fastest orbiting satellites.