Shipping Updates

We’re happy to announce that 95% of Discovery Dishes and Feeds have now arrived the Mouser warehouse! The goods were on a sea freight and train journey for over a month. A couple of weeks ago, there was a scare with a burglary attempt on our container at the train yard. After an investigation, it seems that nothing was taken and there was only cosmetic damage to a few dish boxes where the burglars tried to see the goods inside.

As a reminder, please make sure that your shipping address is up-to-date in your Crowd Supply account. The Mouser warehouse should process the shipment out to backers within the next couple of weeks. Fingers-crossed that they can start shipping orders prior to Christmas.

S-Band Feed is now on Sale

We also wanted to announce that our S-Band feed is now available to purchase on this Crowd Supply page. As the name implies, the S-band feed allows you to receive S-band satellites between 2.2 - 2.3 GHz. You can find a list of satellites at https://www.satdump.org/Satellite-List. Look for satellites that have S-band frequencies such as NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and NOAA-19 which all transmit HRPT in the S-band.

The majority of other S-band satellites only downlink over certain regions of the world, so check the location column on the SatDump satellite list for more information.

Wiki Complete

Our Discovery Dish Wiki is now almost fully completed. The Wiki explains how to construct the dish and feeds, how to set them up, and how to use Discovery Dish for applications like weather satellite image reception, Hydrogen line observations, and STD-C and Aero.

DD RA Software

We have also started work on our own Discovery Dish radio astronomy software called dd_ra, which aims to make getting basic Hydrogen line observations as easy as possible. This software is still in early alpha, so it may not be ready to use yet, but please keep an eye on updates and the repo for progress over time.

Rotator Updates

We have been working with a manufacturer and we believe that we have now settled on a final design that is possible to manufacture at a reasonable cost. If all goes well, we expect to be able to put the rotator up on Crowd Supply in early 2025.

We’ve completed:

• Controller board and sensor board PCB design, prototyping and testing
• Controller firmware, web interface, and rotctl compatibility implementation
• Motor and gearbox selection and long-term testing
• Enclosure CAD design and initial 3D printed and CNC prototyping

What’s left to do:

• Final prototype assembly and testing
• Manufacturing setup
• Crowd Funding

Thank you all for your support of this project. We’re excited to get it into your hands soon.