3 metre dish tour and demos

[Eduard Mol]

Hi all, 

Recently I made this video for my EUCARA conference poster to show how my 3 metre backyard dish is built and operated:

https://youtu.be/2HZcwk9hkGQ?si=pBG6KfEAUoos3jOt

Best, 

Eduard

[ja...@ganssle.com]

Very interesting, Eduard. Thanks for sharing this. I’m building a 1.5-meter dish and this is good food for thought.

 

Jack

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[Alex P]

Jack, 

With smaller dishes, adding a choke ring to narrow the beam pattern takes up a lot of area.

An Alternative : consider building a deep dish circa f/D = 0.30

Alex

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[Alfred Aburto]

That was great Eduard!!

[Anthony]

Nice Eduard!

I am not sure why I thought you were a lot older. 😊

Thank you for sharing this video, enjoy it! 

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[kb3puw]

Very nice implementation.  The framework for the reflector and detector construction look quite elegant.

I recently did a 2 meter implementation using Faraday cloth and was quite surprised how good a reflector it was.  Did you ever try Faraday cloth to see 

how it does relative to aluminum mesh in reducing ground heat noise and RFI?

[Eduard Mol]

Hi, 

I have not tried faraday cloth yet- I have not yet been able to track down a cheap supplier of the stuff on my side of the pond yet. 

Currently the reflector is made from 3mm aluminium mesh (essentially window screening) which is fairly inexpensive here.

Best regards

Eduard

Op ma 15 sep 2025 om 18:54 schreef kb3puw <kb3...@gmail.com>

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[b alex pettit jr]

Faraday Fabric is very soft and needs to be properly tensioned or attached to a good backer to form a proper shape ...

I'd see no advantage over your mesh.

This is a well made folding dish of Faraday Fabric from Sub-Lunar Systems = not easy to replicate.

Alex

[Don Latham]

I agree, Alex. Especially at 22 GHz

Don

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From: "sara" <sara...@googlegroups.com>
To: "sara" <sara...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2025 1:29:39 PM
Subject: Re: [SARA] 3 metre dish tour and demos

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Don Latham
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[kb3puw]

I built something similar to what Alex showed. In USA Amazon it cost me about $30 US dollars for enough to cover a 2 meter dish.  Might be as much as $45 for a 3 meter dish.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXJD1PHS?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_3

[b alex pettit jr]

[Scott Elliott]

kb3puw,

Have you had the fabric out in the weather for extended periods?  How does it age mechanically and rf?  How does humidity/moisture/rain impact the fabric's performance?

-scott

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[kb3puw]

My objectives were a bit different than most. I generally do short duration positioned data collection, not long term drift scans (if you are  interested see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAUCoN1Ue64 )  .  Alex could better answer this question.

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[Eduard Mol]

The 3 metre dush is used for L-band (1420-1665 MHz), NOT 22GHz water line. At 21cm wavelength you can get away with 1- 2cm surface error so building a dish yourself is not that hard. At 13mm wavelength it has to be exact within a mm so any mesh dish would not work and especially not a modular design like this.

Op ma 15 sep 2025 om 22:05 schreef Don Latham <d...@montana.com>

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[Jason Burnfield]

Thanks for the video! It was nice to actually see your setup in detail!