Seeing Satellites with DIY Microwave Camera

I converted a portable satellite antenna into a microwave imager or Ku band "camera". This small motorized dish scans around and records the signal strength to create a heat map of microwave radio energy. It's ideal for viewing satellites in geostationary orbit, finding RF leaks in a room, or creating images from reflected microwave energy.
The hardware I used is a Dish "Tailgater" antenna, the 2014 version with onboard USB A port. I've seen other version of this antenna with different (or no) USB port, but this is the one I was able to connect to my computer and control with serial port commands.
More information on this project is available on my website: saveitforparts...
I've also put my code onto Github, free for anyone to use! github.com/sav...
(If you do use my code, I would love to hear what you did with it!)
I would like to thank @forTodaysAdventure for helping with some Python code ideas.
I would also like to mention a similar project by @thethoughtemporium using custom hardware and a larger satellite dish. That video can be found here: • How to Build a Radio T...
Professor James Aguirre has also imaged satellites with his Mini Radio Telescope (MRT) project, available here: github.com/UPe...
I used the website sky.rogue.space/ to visualize orbits and satellite locations. (prior .space url had an issue, but this one seems to work).
Saveitforparts t-shirts and other merch at my-store-b88bc...
Join this channel to get access to perks:
/ @saveitforparts
Or support me via Patreon at / saveitforparts

[@JamesP33R]

Oh yea, that pesky sun. Used to work with a KU band system, and there were a couple of days, for a few minutes, 4 times a year, where the sun would transit behind our satellite. You could watch the noise floor on the spectrum analyzer, creep up and just totally eat the signal lobe. Complete LoS for about 4 minutes or so. Mean old radiation ball... :)

[@driftwavez]

sometimes at night when i do it. the moon messes with my signal cuz the moon has bad radiation. did u know that?

[@lyoko111]

​@@driftwavez the moon is simply reflecting the radiation & light from the sun. The moon itsels is not radioactive / does not emit radioactivity on its own

[@herringchoker01]

Had the same experience with several geostationary satcomm providers. As you say, the signal would just fade out for 4-5 minutes.

[@terjeoseberg990]

Only 4 minutes? These small satellite dishes are that focused?

[@kicksledkid]

Sunfade season was always crazy at my NOC So many notices to send out explaining that it's the sun's fault

[@Smytjf11]

I love that shot with the reflection in the monitor. That was a really cool effect (and it's a neat project!)

[@alt3241]

Excellent chase of ideas . Years ago I did a few experiments in pasive 3 dimensional imaging of microwave emissions for realtime terrain navigation making waveguides and mostly modifying salvaged equipment you had an easier time doing what took me months as a start of the several years of dabbling .

[@trcostan]

I think it’s far more likely the sky noise isn’t noise at all and you saw LEO sats! Good work awesome project

[@ntcarver]

Love your interest and enthusiasm. This is great! :)

[@lemonblazer123]

These satellite videos have been my favorite series of videos so far! It's really inspiring, too. Time for me to finally finish my Raspberry Pi projects.

[@FrankConforti]

I had an aha! moment during this video. You essentially were collecting data about your surroundings without an active emitter. This passive “RADAR” is what modern military aircraft use to get a picture of the battle field without giving away their position. I’m sure their hardware/software has a higher resolution but the concept is the same. Wow. Thanks for that. Great job!

[@knowyourrights9793]

1:48 Am I the only one impressed at this Reflection on the Computer Screen Shot!?! It's such a simple idea Yet I Honestly haven't seen anyone else do that..lol! All Around GREAT Video!! I couldn't have hit that Sub & Notification button faster!

[@slyworme]

It would be interesting to see what you got if you pointed it in the direction of some of the larger planets. Many years ago I had the opportunity to visit the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in the UK. In the visitor centre they had a 5m dish that you could steer manually and the coordinates for various planets. I was amazed at how much RF was being emitted from Jupiter.

[@saveitforparts]

I need to write some code to account for Earth's rotation and stay on a moving target! Jupiter would be interesting, although I think the radio frequencies it emits are much lower than this little dish can detect.

[@slyworme]

As a first step you could just run your current code to scan the sky and see if it picks up anything when it passes Jupiter. I suspect that you are correct though about the frequency range being much lower.

[@gonzo_the_great1675]

@@saveitforparts You can use the rotation of the earth as one of the scanning axis. It was a common technique for huge low frequency antennas used for radop astronomy.

[@1islam1]

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[@davidsnyder3799]

@@1islam1 Wow. You're annoying. You're not going to win any hearts and minds with that spam. Would you eat spam? No, of course not. So, what makes you think anyone else would swallow your spam? You can enjoy life and show respect to your creator and your fellow humans by not being a miserable little spammer.

[@edgeeffect]

I love the camera angle where you've got code on screen and you're using that same screen as a mirror... that's superb!!!

[@joeteejoetee]

I subscribed to your YT channel because of the name SaveItForParts. Re-using discontinued/failed/older electronics is the ULTIMATE way to re-cycle them because it retains the "man-hours" and intellectual effort to construct our devices going decades back into the last century. That labor & IP cannot be recycled if the "e-Waste" is ground-up and melted down - the human labor VALUE is lost forever... Bravo sir!

[@tactileslut]

You're preaching my religion.

[@saveitforparts]

Yep, I hate seeing perfectly good stuff get thrown out, and can never pass a dumpster without checking it.

[@clazy8]

Reminds me of the Post Apocalyptic Inventor's philosophy. I love his channel.

[@forTodaysAdventure]

thanks for the shoutout! Its really cool that you went to grad school for cs, I went to grad school for physics.

[@saveitforparts]

Thanks for the help! This was a fun project!

[@tomh.648]

08:56 - Good Lord, I hadn't really seen a visualization of just how many artificial satellites we've launched into orbit. The term "astounding" comes to mind. Just wow.

[@gannas42]

Whoa! I had no idea you could use small dishes in this way. That is rad! Also I didn't know you have a CS background. Nice job with the coding. I'm an IT guy by trade - had to learn Ruby over the past sixth months. I am crap at coding in general though. 😂 Looking forward to where you go with these dishes. Thanks for the great video. Very creative!

[@saveitforparts]

I rarely do any coding, but it's actually kind of fun when it's for a weird project like this!

[@seemeeseeu]

I think you're great! One of my goals to be able to program homestead needs to actuators and such, from stuff that I find. I think I can do it. Thank you for the inspiration and information. Sending you thoughts for much success to you and your channel.

[@thisismyname1920]

That was incredibly interesting. Wonderful video!!

[@sfdntk]

This is so damn awesome, and you are such an inspiration to me.

[@algorithminc.8850]

Fun stuff. Subscribed. Great channel - look forward to seeing some of the other videos. Thanks. Cheers.

[@mikerhodes9198]

Excellent post. Very interesting.

[@ryanjsmith23]

Love the monitor reflection shot.

[@lavilyse2706]

Discovered you today, watched 3 videos & can truly say you re a legend! :)

[@sam2902]

Man, great attitude!! I dont know anything about radio gear but its cool hearing you get into it!

[@dproduzioni]

boy, I just discovered this guy and he is AWESOME!

[@DrizzleWoolf]

Thank you for this insight on radiofrequence

[@McRocket]

I originally came here because of the train stuff. But whoa! This stuff is amazing! I had NO idea you could take a 'microwave' image of a house/anything. REALLY impressive. Thanks for this. ☮

[@saveitforparts]

Glad you like it! I'm working on train stuff right now, so there should be more of that soon!

[@joefish6091]

The resolution is going to be 1/4 wavelength, same as Fish finder flashers behave.

[@TheKillerSn4ke]

Essentially he’s built a passive bistatic radar that uses noncooperative transmitters. Neat stuff.

[@artrock8175]

Awesome project! Thanks for sharing! 🙏

[@lawrencebrown3582]

I was really impressed by that! A great presentation. 👍

[@6079__Smith__W]

Love your work, dude

[@criminalbrewing5509]

This is Fascinating Experimental Tech.

[@derickniles1329]

Really cool.

[@daveys]

This is really interesting. Your use of those surplus dishes is fantastic. Being able to see the 3rd harmonic of the 5.8GHz module on your PC and those geostationary satellites is very interesting.

[@johnpeterson7264]

Excellent !

[@pesos3]

Great job, thanks for motivation

[@scormat713]

Love your energy keep up this work.

[@ProjectGeek1]

Woa! I'm glad this worked! I really wanna do this!

[@michalrzmichalrz6656]

Awesome, really inspiring stuff!

[@TheMalerdaemon]

Absolutely brilliant work….

[@ChipGuy]

How cool is that to see a picture like that again. I did something similar with a 1.2m Ku Band DX Dish that also had a elevation correction. But it could not move as freely as your antenna. However the picture I generated from the sattelites looked pretty much the same. This was back in 1994 when we had to take a picture, develop it and scan it with a scanner. No digital cameras back then.

[@tylers2457]

This is fantastic! Thank you for sharing and I'm looking forward to more!

[@samuelfrancis9143]

One of the coolest facts in this video was learning the Arthur C Clarke came up with geo stationary orbits

[@agroman77]

very well done Sir.

[@osvaldodelcompare6627]

I really like WHAT YOU DO, greetings from Argentina

[@toddmcgowan9449]

I love your videos! One thing to consider on these RV dish antennas is that they expect you to point them to the South, which is where their satelites are located. Keep up the great job!!

[@nekomakhea9440]

This is incredibly cool

[@zebdeming]

Passive radar would be super cool!

[@rocklicker639]

That's a pretty sweet milk crate collection!

[@saveitforparts]

Quick update on this, if anyone is thinking of doing the same and looking for a compatible antenna: I got my older (2011) Tailgater with the Mini-USB jack to give me a serial console. The firmware is slightly different and it doesn't have the elangle command, but everything else seems to be the same. Sadly the motors are 100% seized up from water ingress at some point (probably why I got that one for free). If I can find the same motor online I might try to replace them. So, I'm guessing any Tailgaters between at least 2011 and 2014 will work for this! You might have to substitute elev for elangle and tweak the range values in the Python code depending on firmware version.

[@swanee]

This is fascinating!

[@phoenixrising4073]

This is just amazingly cool. Really fun project, never knew this could be done. I'm subscribing.

[@citizenrich]

This is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

[@das250250]

Very cool project and well executed .

[@deeiks12]

Brilliant work. Awesome video.

[@sexyme8593]

I love your drive and mood! Thanks for sharing

[@yanfishtwig2356]

This is a super cool project i have often wondered about seeing in spectrums other than light Also this channel is an instant subscribe for me

[@terenceokane]

VERY cool vid! I work in pro video and using a scaled waveform is similar how you can make out objects in the luminosity levels. Its like reading the matrix! Been absolutely loving the channel! I have to keep it somewhat neat at home but at work I have my hoard of parts and broken things and I love using it all to keep things working. Respect!

[@crackthefoundation_]

This is fantastic... Subscribed!!!!!

[@czerskip]

The direction the angle is measured in does make sense: from X to Y axis that is counterclockwise.

[@Youtube_free_always]

+Y -x + X -y

[@peregreena9046]

In celestial coordinates, East is + because that's the direction, the Earth is rotating.

[@craigzeigler124]

Fascinating. Thanks.

[@s1l3nttt]

Great video

[@CharlesVanNoland]

To get higher resolution you'll actually need a better dish! That one is small and not very parabolic - that's why you see ringing artifacts around those sats on the left by the tree. Those are caused by the dish not being "focused" enough. You can think of it like bokeh from a lens that's not focused properly. It's designed just to pick up a signal, not a perfect pinpoint focused signal, which is what you'd want for clearer scanning for imaging purposes. Still awesome!

[@saveitforparts]

That's kind of what I thought the rings might be. I've been debating if it's worth doing the "nudge" command for smaller scan increments, but it looks like the beam width of the dish is more than a degree.

[@DanielLopez-up6os]

This was really cool!

[@quadmods]

Great discovery’s! Love this grass roots tech 👍

[@jaycal1920]

Love it, very interesting stuff.

[@martink9785]

Very cool!

[@ftwproject658]

This is brilliant!

[@RubenKelevra]

I think it makes sense to have adaptive resolution: If the dish picks up a strong signal, it can use the nudge feature to increase the resolution in this area. If not the standard resolution is probably enough.

[@c567591]

I agree... find the edge of the object and then nudge back across it to see if you can get more details. Use the more accurate nudge direction for scanning. Then "restore" back to the position it was and continue on.

[@peterwoolliams1283]

Limited resolution from the small dish size. If you could determine the resolution function imaging a point source… eg a satellite, you could deconvolve the image to get a higher resolution result. Failing that you could use multiple dishes and then use interferometry to synthesise a higher resolution… but the hardware probably won’t allow that. Cool project!!

[@zazugee]

if you had 4 dishs in a square array, you could do a phased array to get better resolution

[@peterwoolliams1283]

@@zazugee if you could phase connect them together and do the maths. The more in each direction and the further apart the better. If an amateur could pull it off I would be impressed.

[@ethzero]

Very nicely done, and explained!

[@memejeff]

Really cool. Glad they work so well as radiotelescopes. That code is great. Seems a lot more accessible than most other radiotelescope projects. Those scans are amazing. The resolution is really impressive.

[@yutubl]

Thanks for interesting video about satellite adjustable dishs technology via PC. I never installed a satellite dish (never got information about and never needed it in my first professional education as radio TV service technician (1984 analog electronic + terristrial broadcast). After finishing it I and a friend decided to qualify electrical engineering with specialization computer engineering in my home town (Flensburg University of Applied Sciences, a Motorola branch produced/shipped their first mobile phones in europe/EMEA). That was a better choice than my first choice which was unfortunately not offered in my home town: communication technology, and when meeting fresh communication engineers they told me their work was programming, so I stayed and continued going into programming and software development, but that was never my first choice, it was more by accident.

[@henrysara7716]

Code is a never end learning process. Keep it up, great channel.

[@electro4us]

Wery nice! Great work! Дякую! Так тримати!

[@jacobdavidcunningham1440]

cool project

[@lopiklop]

A lot of people thin that CS means programming. I also think people want to see the trials of error. It helps them understand.

[@lukysmrcek7877]

Awesome work!

[@AutomationDnD]

Just found your channel. I'm no _Expert_ at this stuff but This seems like a really *REALLY well done* Applied (physics) Lab-type.Thingy Great Work.

[@JonnyWaldes]

You're a wizard!

[@whitefordpipeshandmadebymi7238]

Really cool stuff man , enjoyed watching and learned a lot, take care 73 de ve3hip from Welland Ontario Canada 🇨🇦

[@orion31410]

Amazing

[@realifejon]

lol I cannot stop wtatching your satellite videos! this all started a few months ago when I was walking my dogs and saw a house with 4 different dishes - just had to find someone on youtube doing something interesting with them 😂

[@dominicweston8837]

Dish envy. 😍 I miss my 12ft Conifer.

[@mapleleaf4ever]

This was really interesting!

[@usradioguy]

Excellent! Well done Video, and even better experimenting!

[@saveitforparts]

Thanks! Your projects have given me a lot of inspiration! I'm having a lot of fun slowly improving my satellite and radio skills.

[@usradioguy]

@@saveitforparts looking at your video it sure looks like that tailgator would make a nice HRPT tracker if it was fast enough. Pop that small dish off and put on a small grid dish our similar

[@MitzpatrickFitzsimmons]

wow... very cool!

[@Disl3cic]

Awesome job!

[@robwgeorge]

Awesome episode. You're a great inspiration. Keep up the great work.

[@robwgeorge]

And you got a mention from Hackaday! Woot!

[@rowanjones3476]

This is basically how commercial dish pointing systems (e.g. on news vans) work. The controller points the dish in roughly the right direction using GPS, compass heading and a database of satellite orbits, then does a peaking search on the beacon frequency in a small grid to account for errors in its calculation of where it thinks the satellite should be. All sensors have error. Of course this only works for geostationary satellites.

[@saveitforparts]

I should look for an old news van at surplus sales :-D

[@PapaWheelie1]

The really old trucks were all manual. You just had to learn where they were and what the spectrum looked like. Now they just call us old guys when the auto dish fails or needs a new sat programmed in 😂

[@AtrumNoxProductions]

This is so cool!!

[@ukaszguziczak7712]

Thats so cool!

[@bimaputranugraha5722]

brooo coolest reflection ever

[@ianuragaggarwal]

Very interesting 😮

[@PhonePhreak3z]

I love these videos! I wish I would of found this channel sooner!

[@Superkuh2]

Incredibly cool imaging! If you want a good calibration radio source for Ku band get a CCFL bulb and turn it on.

[@saveitforparts]

Interesting, I'll have to try that!

[@andremantovani]

awesome!!!

[@markrix]

Thanks!

[@saveitforparts]

Glad you like it!

[@jb2590]

Wow, I'm glad I came across your video, I just subbed. I started playing with one of these back in 2020, was able to control the dish over a serial console but I'm not a code guy so i haven't got back to this project. my goal was to change the LNB for a ham radio antenna and use the dish to track LEO radio satellites. Great work and I'm lookin forward to more videos on this!

[@saveitforparts]

Cool! Glad to hear someone else has one of these, so far it seems people have a hard time finding the right model. A ham antenna would be fun, I'm not sure if the little motors can handle a 2M yagi, but maybe they'd do a 70cm. I have that on my list for some other pan/tilt junk I have lying around, just too many projects on the to-do pile.

[@sergeialeksandrovichstepan1727]

super!

[@thecriss88]

Regarding what you need to learn that stuff: 1. be smart 2. be motivated You seem to have both.

[@Seasonstobecheerful]

Love your enthusiasm and resourceful creativity 👍nice work 👏

[@mike97525]

These are great vids keep up the good work😎😎

[@runforitman]

I love videos with radio imagery I remember thoughtemporium made one and imaged the wifi routers in his dorm

[@runforitman]

just as I commented this, you mentioned thoughtemporium lmao

[@saveitforparts]

I've talked to them briefly about another of my projects, they do some cool stuff!

[@ebenking3567]

I love this video. Thanks. I feel you about a CS degree not teaching coding. I have a CS BS and in the course of my degree I had a course or two in C, C++, Ada, and 370 ASM (not necessarily in that order). In short, nothing modern. I mainly code in Bash these days, though I can sometimes read C if it's not too complex. For imaging fast objects (LEO), I suggest you scan the sky in vertical stripes, then do the rest of the scene however you want. Depending on which way you move the stripe the image will either be expanded or squashed, but probably not very skewed. For sending text one char at a time, you could write a procedure that takes a command and sends it one char at a time. Then in the body of your code, call your new procedure. It won't make things work any better, it just makes your code easier to read. Anyhow, best of luck.