@donde Dreamcatcher v3.03 will be available next Friday, the 4th of May. We will have some interesting updates to share. More work on the display has been done and there will be some very rough open source software to control Dreamcatcher as a frequency agile packet radio.
Thanks for the offer of the LNB. I have about a thousand of them, so I’m ok for now ;).
To answer your question, no, the price will not be $119. It will go up a bit. The LNB, adapter, and display are really eating away at our margins, so we need to increase the price to cover those additional costs.
I too have a couple of lnb’s now. Will the v3.02 board be upgrade-able to the capabilities mentioned for the v3.03 … in particular… the frequency agile packet radio. Entry into the realm of lora sx1280 based radio communications as a transceiver might help the DC to be a local wide-area hotspot.
I’d love a price break if I can use my existing lnb.
None of the latest DC3 equipment yet. Waiting till next Friday to get back on the boat. I have copied inmarsat Safetynet streaming data in almost real time 24/7. Does Outernet now do the same? If not, will it in future? Should not have to wait overnight for the “newspaper” like in DC2 days.
Carnegietechnologies antenna:
It seems this is a usefull technique to make simple, cheap reflector surface.
Based on Fresnel lens technolgy, and maybe, 3D printing. Its compact an mobile unit.
Here are links to higher resolution pictures to study the surface:
Sory, I havenot a full overvies about all the forum threads. I found the link on the carnegietechnoligoes antenna on a local forum, connected to amateur satellite tracking. I put it here. But now I made a small search on this forum too, and I found the same link from “donde” some weeks ago.
Sorry for double posting…
But the topic is interesting. To search with google offers a huge amount of materials.
t.janos
Hi Janos @tjanos, this looks like a great antenna, however, at 18 pounds additional load, I don’t think it would fit the mission object, of course, depending on whether one has pack animals to assist…
No worries. The important part is the contribution and the ensuing discussion.
IMHO, we really only need about 3-6 dB gain. The reason for this is that the satellite signal is Chirp Spread Spectrum and has a good amount of Process Gain.
The Carnegie ‘dish’ offers far more gain than what’s actually needed. It has 37-39 dB gain according to their marketing collateral. However, it’s an interesting idea. Can a smaller, flat Fresnel reflector be built cheaply that offers about 3-6 dB gain? Is this cheaper than a cone (like my martini mixer cup)? Are there small conventional reflector solutions (like the one in my mobile satellite dish)?
I wondering what Syed has planned for the new LNB he’s talked about? If that’s coming out soon (?? @Syed), maybe we should wait and stick with cones and horns awhile to get the additional gain we need? Ken
Ken,
My guess it’s a Ku-Band circuit-board multiple patch pc-board antenna married to a PLL-based LNB. My hunch is based on a circuit board with 16 patch elements on it that I saw at one time on the Outernet page. The foreshadowing photo has since disappeared.
I have been playing book study engineer on why we are getting improvements with our “cones” or “kones”.
We are not seeing any increase in signal strength so no power gain. My guess is that we are changing the “background” temperature or “brightness” that the receiving element in the lnb is “seeing”. There are a variety of terms used… But if we look directly up (vertically) at 12GHz the value that the antenna sees is different then if the antenna is pointed more toward the horizon.
I think our cones are suppressing the “sidelobe” noise. This results in improved signal to noise ratios.
What ever it is I hope it comes out soon and we can then have a signal in the Philippines and I will celebrate by buying one. Especially if it has
a “K-Band On-top Noise excluder”… KONE.
I finally see the price for the newest Dreamcatcher at $149. It’s surly not under the heading of Buy. What’s included in the package? Also, we need to see the differences between the $119 board also offered, or is it still available? Why do I need the newest board? Is it more hardware or updated engineering? Couldn’t the change be made in firmware? I do understand the hard work still be done on this worthwhile project. But, a timeline is hard to find. I’m not complaining, just asking. How about a $119 kit option of the newest board? A donation tab? I would like to see twice a month newsletter update of what’s going on. Thank You!
We got a discount on our Alpha DreamCatcher 3.02Q because all the bugs weren’t worked out. Now the DC 3.03 is out … hurry up maybe the first 25 are not sold out yet. I bought my DC 3.03 to move forward with experiments on my bench.
WA4OSH