Gabe from You Tube saveitforpartschannel with CCERA radome and big dish.

[Stephen Arbogast]

Gabe  from  the  You Tube channel    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2_vqQBB0yI&t=2s

is  struggling  with  calibrating  the  pointing  of his big  dish.

He is using  an az/el mount  built  for   a video surveillance  camera mounted on  a  wobbly  wooden frame.   My guess  is  with  the  big  dish, narrow beam, he needs  more  accuracy  than   his video camera az/el   drive  can provide.

Perhaps  some one  with more expertise  than I can help him  out?  He  wants  to do Radio Astronomy  in the  future.

[Marcus D. Leech]

He has some heavier-duty parts I sent him many months ago for the bigger dish.   The PTZ camera mount (with the smaller dish) is a "stepping stone" for him.

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[Robert Meade]

For HI, his HPBW is on the order of +/- 10 degrees. He's probably fine with 1 deg pointing accuracy which it looks like he may achieve based on his video. He's certainly ahead of most of us for the ability to say track M33 for 6 hours in a single night instead of compiling 18+ main beam transits for a really high SNR detect of the spin doppler peaks. The more I see from DIY solutions for rotating dishes of that size (or larger), the more I start to respect the price point of the RF HAM Design (marketed) solutions and/or the Yaesu G5500 solutions for mesh dishes up to 4.5m. He could probably just buy one of those to achieve his desired pointing accuracy. He's seems pretty serious and given the size of the radome, I'd be surprised if he doesn't try to squeeze a 3 or 3.7m in there. If I already owned the radome, I'd just buy the RF Ham Design mesh dish to put in there as a starting point, but he can get away without mesh given he doesn't have to deal with wind loading.

His whole mantra is "save it for parts" though, so he likes not using the intended equipment and seeing what can be done with scraps. This is one where getting a scrap radome at really low or zero cost opened a lot of possibilities and I'd look at COTS dish stuff for inside it.

[Stephen Arbogast]

Well..   I  don't  know   the   specs of  his  dish. He  said  he  is  having  difficulty  pointing his  dish  accurately.   I  don't  know  the  specs  of his  camera  pointing   motors....   

I think he  is  doing  wonderfully........

[Stephen Arbogast]

As   for   COTS   we  all  start some where.  I  made  my first   circuit   board  in my Mother's    laundry sink  in  1967...   I  got  in  a  lot  of trouble  for it....  it  worked    a  local  oscillator   for   down  conversion.......

[James Abshier]

This is an interesting video for me since the camera positioner that he is using looks like the QuickSet positioner that I have. If it is, the position sensors are potentiometers. My guess is that the accuracy is around 1 percent, which for azimuth is 3.6 degrees. For elevation it would be 1.8 degrees. I was figuring that to be  useful for radio astronomy, the positioning system would have to be calibrated over its range. The fact that he has a rather large antenna being driven by the camera positioner is encouraging, since I had thought that a large antenna would have to be carefully counter balanced if driven by the camera positioner. The positioner that I have is supposed to be able to take a load of 90 pounds, but I don't usually run it at its rated voltage of 115 VDC.

I have often wondered how useful my camera positioner would be for pointing antennas. Gabe's video has demonstrated that it could be very useful.

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 2026-04-02 12:48, James Abshier wrote:

This is an interesting video for me since the camera positioner that he is using looks like the QuickSet positioner that I have. If it is, the position sensors are potentiometers. My guess is that the accuracy is around 1 percent, which for azimuth is 3.6 degrees. For elevation it would be 1.8 degrees. I was figuring that to be  useful for radio astronomy, the positioning system would have to be calibrated over its range. The fact that he has a rather large antenna being driven by the camera positioner is encouraging, since I had thought that a large antenna would have to be carefully counter balanced if driven by the camera positioner. The positioner that I have is supposed to be able to take a load of 90 pounds, but I don't usually run it at its rated voltage of 115 VDC.

I have often wondered how useful my camera positioner would be for pointing antennas. Gabe's video has demonstrated that it could be very useful.

 

The Olde Skool PTZ mounts are getting harder to find, since modern surveillance cams are much. much, lighter.

For the 3m dish he's going to be putting in there, he has an entirely different mechanical system in the works.    But he has had success with many of these
  older PTZ mounts that he's gotten mostly from AxMan Surplus.

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