What dish to buy, wide question

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Jim Dåderman

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Feb 20, 2026, 6:07:50 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Hello,

I am somewhat in a pickle regarding what dish to buy.
My objectives are SETI but for sure "regular" radio astronomy as well.

Thinking somewhere between 1.5 and 3.4 meters, aluminium solid or meshed.
Should preferable be something I could put motors on in the future.

So, what dish/type of dish would the experts in here recommend?

How about these from Satpro.se?
Or am I better of with something meshed from AliExpress?

Kind regards / Jim

flavio camacho

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Feb 20, 2026, 6:55:48 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Hello Jim,

Excellent question, my concerns are similar. I look forward to the replies. Thanks for asking and thanks in advance for the replies. 

Flavio. 
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Eduard Mol

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Feb 20, 2026, 8:03:16 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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It depends on your objectives and how big a dish you are willing to handle…
For SETI I guess you want a dish that is as large as possible, the largest radio telescopes in the world have been looking for ET signals for decades without much success so far, so if these signals even exist they’re either very weak or extremely rare. 
The WOW signal for example was about 50 to 200 Jy. That was a very bright for the Big Ear radio telescope, but it would be challenging to detect with an amateur instrument today. In terms of brightness and bandwidth it was similar to the brightest OH masers at 1612 MHz. From my own experience these are quite challenging to detect even with a 3 metre dish. 

A solid dish is usually more expensive and will have more wind load, the only benefit is that you can use it at shorter (cm-mm) wavelengths if the surface is accurate enough. However, if you plan to observe at longer wavelengths like 21cm a mesh dish will work just as well as a solid dish. 






Op vr 20 feb 2026 om 12:07 schreef Jim Dåderman <j...@jimedia.se>
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flavio camacho

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Feb 20, 2026, 8:26:36 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Thanks, don't want to jump ahead of Jim here but you mention surface accuracy, I am guessing it refers to smoothness, curvature and maybe LNB setup? Yes I fought the wind loads already with a 2m satellite TV setups. Thanks again. 


On Friday, February 20, 2026, Eduard Mol <eddiem...@gmail.com> wrote:
It depends on your objectives and how big a dish you are willing to handle…
For SETI I guess you want a dish that is as large as possible, the largest radio telescopes in the world have been looking for ET signals for decades without much success so far, so if these signals even exist they’re either very weak or extremely rare. 
The WOW signal for example was about 50 to 200 Jy. That was a very bright for the Big Ear radio telescope, but it would be challenging to detect with an amateur instrument today. In terms of brightness and bandwidth it was similar to the brightest OH masers at 1612 MHz. From my own experience these are quite challenging to detect even with a 3 metre dish. 

A solid dish is usually more expensive and will have more wind load, the only benefit is that you can use it at shorter (cm-mm) wavelengths if the surface is accurate enough. However, if you plan to observe at longer wavelengths like 21cm a mesh dish will work just as well as a solid dish. 





Op vr 20 feb 2026 om 12:07 schreef Jim Dåderman <j...@jimedia.se>
Hello,

I am somewhat in a pickle regarding what dish to buy.
My objectives are SETI but for sure "regular" radio astronomy as well.

Thinking somewhere between 1.5 and 3.4 meters, aluminium solid or meshed.
Should preferable be something I could put motors on in the future.

So, what dish/type of dish would the experts in here recommend?

How about these from Satpro.se?
Or am I better of with something meshed from AliExpress?

Kind regards / Jim

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Eduard Mol

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Feb 20, 2026, 8:33:50 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Yes, indeed how closely the dish shape matches a paraboloid. As a general role of thumb you want the RMS surface error to be within 1/10th of a wavelength. At 21cm that’s about 2cm so you have quite a bit of tolerance. 

Op vr 20 feb 2026 om 14:26 schreef flavio camacho <flavioc...@gmail.com>
Thanks, don't want to jump ahead of Jim here but you mention surface accuracy, I am guessing it refers to smoothness, curvature and maybe LNB setup? Yes I fought the wind loads already with a 2m satellite TV setups. Thanks again. 

On Friday, February 20, 2026, Eduard Mol <eddiem...@gmail.com> wrote:
It depends on your objectives and how big a dish you are willing to handle…
For SETI I guess you want a dish that is as large as possible, the largest radio telescopes in the world have been looking for ET signals for decades without much success so far, so if these signals even exist they’re either very weak or extremely rare. 
The WOW signal for example was about 50 to 200 Jy. That was a very bright for the Big Ear radio telescope, but it would be challenging to detect with an amateur instrument today. In terms of brightness and bandwidth it was similar to the brightest OH masers at 1612 MHz. From my own experience these are quite challenging to detect even with a 3 metre dish. 

A solid dish is usually more expensive and will have more wind load, the only benefit is that you can use it at shorter (cm-mm) wavelengths if the surface is accurate enough. However, if you plan to observe at longer wavelengths like 21cm a mesh dish will work just as well as a solid dish. 





Op vr 20 feb 2026 om 12:07 schreef Jim Dåderman <j...@jimedia.se>
Hello,

I am somewhat in a pickle regarding what dish to buy.
My objectives are SETI but for sure "regular" radio astronomy as well.

Thinking somewhere between 1.5 and 3.4 meters, aluminium solid or meshed.
Should preferable be something I could put motors on in the future.

So, what dish/type of dish would the experts in here recommend?

How about these from Satpro.se?
Or am I better of with something meshed from AliExpress?

Kind regards / Jim

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flavio camacho

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Feb 20, 2026, 8:40:41 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Copy that and will research RMS surface error. 

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Mike Otte

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Feb 20, 2026, 10:06:09 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Solid dishes catch rain water at certain declinations.  I lower the elevation in the morning to dump the water from the dish.

Snow loads can be quite high, especially wet snow.  Here again I use low elevations of the dish to let the snow slough off as it accumulates
I know the experts suggest "birdbath" position for stowing but  it looks scary with a foot of snow in the dish.

Mike



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Jim Dåderman

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Feb 20, 2026, 10:17:08 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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That's a valid concern, this is Sweden... 

flavio camacho

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Feb 20, 2026, 10:38:24 AM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Copy Mike thanks on behalf of Jim. 

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Ayushman Tripathi

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Feb 20, 2026, 1:35:26 PM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Hi Jim, Flavio

My goals were similar to yours when I purchased my dish. I bought a 2.4 m mesh prime focus dish. At present, I’m using it for hydrogen line observations, and I also plan to use it for SETI searches.

Although the odds of detection are extremely small, the total SETI search space explored so far is vastly less than 1% of the possible parameter space. It is often described as equivalent to searching the volume of a hot tub compared to all of Earth’s oceans (Wright et al., 2018, How Much SETI Has Been Done? Finding Needles in the n-Dimensional Cosmic Haystack, arXiv:1809.07252).

If there is an ETI signal that is strong enough and nearby, and if the dish happens to be pointing in the right direction, then I believe even a smaller dish has some chance of detecting it if it has sufficient gain. Of course, using the largest dish you can reasonably manage will improve sensitivity.

Also, if you plan to experiment with higher-frequency SETI work in the future, a solid dish may be a better option since it generally has better surface accuracy compared to a mesh dish.

It is possible we haven’t detected anything yet simply because we haven’t pointed at the right place in this vast universe.

Later on, I plan to use an array of 5–6 dishes of similar size and combine them coherently as an interferometer.

Thanks

Attached Hydrogen Line spectrum is from my 2.4m Dish

Figure_183.png

flavio camacho

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Feb 20, 2026, 1:54:23 PM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Again on behalf of Jim as he started all this I say thanks. 

This is wonderful as we now have a starting point ( your 1420hz hydrogen spectrum I believe) to reference when we get setup. I know now what to look for or to work the setup until I get it for starters. 

Thanks 
Flavio. 
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Don Latham

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Feb 20, 2026, 8:22:18 PM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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To get started, get a solar cooker from Amazon ...
------------
Don Latham
PO Box 404,
Frenchtown, MT, 59846
406-626-4304
 
From: Jim <j...@jimedia.se>
To: Society <sara...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, 20 February 2026 4:07 AM MST
Subject: [SARA] What dish to buy, wide question
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Jeff Weiss

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Feb 20, 2026, 9:37:15 PM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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I purchased a dish like this from Walmart for $109 us. Now it is $350 for some reason. 

Here on ebay you can get it for $49 us. 

I 3d printed a bracket for it so I can run it on my German Equatorial Mount.

I am trying to figure out how to drift method.

Right now i just slew down the Milky Way over 18 hours and capture as much data as possible.







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Mike Otte

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Feb 20, 2026, 11:11:33 PM (2 days ago) Feb 20
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Jeff,
Your graph/scan is unique because it is north-south on the larger arm of the Milkyway so you are moving declination. looks good, I just never thought of it that way.

Drift scanning usually lets the Earth rotate, changing the Right Ascension and keeping  the Declination at one value for 24 hr . that's the drift.
With this technique you get the 2 bumps of the milkyway.  Then by changing the declination by decrements over the period of maybe a month or two you can draw line by line the picture of the cosmos. that's the scan.

The antenna looks nice, it is only 4 ft where as the solar cooker is 5 ft but it has a nice stand( maybe not too strong for wind and such.
Also that $49 is in China .

Welcome to radio astronomy! Looks like you have a good start.

mike w9ys

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Robert Meade

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Feb 21, 2026, 2:27:10 PM (22 hours ago) Feb 21
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A bit of a shameless plug, but if you don't want to DIY a feed, I offer the Deep-Sky Dish kit to use a discovery feed with the 1.5m solar cooker dish. You can find it on ebay here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/357828710797. Discovery feeds are for sale by KrakenRF on CrowdSupply Here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/discovery-dish Please don't feel pressured to go this route, I just think its a good option to get an essentially COTS feed on the solar cooker dishes. You get pretty good performance (6.6 dB better gain than the discovery dish and ~ half the beamwidth) but the pattern of the feed is likely less optimized than a DIY waveguide/cantenna feed where you have full control.

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Alex P

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Feb 21, 2026, 4:40:08 PM (19 hours ago) Feb 21
to Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers
And, since the topic of Kraken Discovery Dish systems was suggested, 
Here is an Evaluation of the Disco Feed paired with a 1m WiFi Dish


KrakenDD_Performance.jpg
Alex Pettit
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