Show HN: EZ-TRAK Satellite Hand Tracking Suite

(github.com)

40 points | by benbojangles 2 days ago ago

11 comments

  • ooterness 2 days ago

    When you say "hand track", you're not kidding.

    I was expecting something with motors controlled by a person, but this is literally picking up the dish and pointing it by muscle power.

    Back of envelope, a 1 meter parabolic antenna at 1.7 GHz gives about 12 degree beam width (FWHM), which is what makes this practical. Very clever.

  • Liftyee a day ago

    Neat project! I've always wanted to try downlinking data from satellites because it just seems like magic. I wonder what sort of reactions you'd get from setting this up in a backpack/cyberdeck and walking around pointing a satellite dish at the sky.

  • lotyrin a day ago

    I guess I'm just too far down the motion-capture rabbit hole, but I first interpreted this phrase as "tracking hands by satellite" rather than "tracking satellites by hand". I think purely linguistically (without any context that it's going to be easier for a hand to track a satellite than a satellite to track a hand) it's likely to be interpreted that way, also.

  • wkat4242 a day ago

    Really cool project! What kind of foldable dish do you use?

    • benbojangles a day ago

      it's called a farabrella kinda a diy thing made from faraday fabric weighs about 350gr for a 1m diameter dish. They are available on ebay.

      • wkat4242 a day ago

        Thanks I'll check it out!

  • hiatus a day ago

    Am I missing something or is this repo devoid of the code mentioned in the README?

    • benbojangles 21 hours ago

      I don't think it's being given away for free sorry about that

      • hiatus 15 hours ago

        Aren't you the author? What are you showing HN here? There are special rules for Show HN.

        > Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.

        > If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html