Dish Network dish

Can a Dish Network dish be used for Outernet? I don’t know much about satellite antennas, but have a 10 year old Dish Network dish available.

Nope. Not any more. Dish Network is on KU Band (10GHz) and Outernet is on L Band (1.5GHz).

You could try removing the LNB from the front of the dish and installing an L Band antenna in its place. That would certainly increase the gain but it would be hard to align.

If you did mount the L band antenna at the focal point of a dish, would this increase the download speed, or just make the signal stronger? I understand that the higher the frequency, the greater the data flow, hence why the old Ku band dishes could do more than ten times the the L band download rate, but can this be improved with a dish?

If so, what is the hypothetical maximum download speed for a really big dish?

Also, here is a cool poster that relates to this topic:

A larger dish will increase the gain of the signal but will make the pickup pattern thighter. This will make it harder to focus the antenna.

Increasing the gain beyond a positive lock will not make data transfer any faster. Once you are not losing packets due to data loss (poor signal quality) any additional gain does not improve the transfer.

Speed of the transfer is dependent on the modulation used, along with bandwidth, and frequency. Since you cannot change any of those parameters you will not be able to increase the speed.

Hope this makes sense.