Parabola design

 For a while now I have been designing parabolic reflectors for Space satellite research purposes.

One of my favorite parabolic antenna of all time is the erectable S-Band antenna used by the Apollo 12 space mission.

A super lightweight highly engineered device.

It's purpose as in the description was to be a compact erectable antenna which would open out into both a receiving and transmitting antenna to send and reeive S-band frequencies directly from the Moon surface to the Earth.

So I have been looking into it to reproduce.

Here's my working functional prototype. it is 1m diameter and the feed is desgned for 1.7ghz reception of weather satellite data.

Slide arm design.

at it's full erection.

Here we see the opening and closing in action.

Anyway, i'm forever continuing the iterations and it's functioning better than i expected. I hope I did NASA proud :)
Oh and i'm now a fully qualified certified Devops and Cloud computing specialist. Go me!

Thanks for reading.

Things this week

 I have been doing a few things this week. 

I re-did my ebike. I built it in 2016.

 

 

And it is still going strong, same batteries still working, same motor, same everything. Brake blocks have been replaced a few times. It has paid for itself many times over, and given wonderful freedom and mobility to my everyday life, taking care of grocery shopping, adventures, food delivery work, alsorts. It is over 6 years ago it was built and it still goes fine. You can read about that here.

I decided to give it a few new things.

I scrubbed it clean, removed the decals and made it look all polished. I added full rain fenders. I relocated the 10ah 48v lipo battery to hang from the top tube. New Schwalbe Energizer tyres which are just amazing. And I added some suspension forks to cancel out the potholes. Much smoother ride.

So that's that.

I also have been experimenting with Horn antenna for satellite data tracking.

 

 

Using hardware store xps foam cut into shapes.

working along side a helical antenna.

We start to shape the horn.

 Then we repurposed all these scraps to line the horn.

Creates microwave reflectance.

Me so Horny.

So that is that. Test results coming soon.