Didn’t see a good place for this, so I thought I’d start it. Here’s my current setup…
Enclosure for the electronics is $2 worth of food storage container from the supermarket. Big advantage: it only takes a pair of scissors to make cable cutouts
The antenna mount is a PanaVise Junior, which clamps nicely on to the cable holder on the back of the patch antenna.
Here is my antenna, and LNA in a £1 sandwich box ( in the rain) at the end of 5 Metres of coax.
It is sitting on the top of a ladder because it was convenient LOL … and YES that is “blue tack” waterproofing the hole for the cable 
the LNA & the antenna are held to the bottom of the box with double sided sticky-tape, and there is a little bag of “silica gel” in there for good measure.
Still getting over 9db with the rain…
… looks pretty like mine:-) This seems to be a s standard setup 
. The complete stuff is in the box and sits at a shed outside my house because it has to look through a slot between two uphill houses to see the Alphasat with 30° elevation. It is connected via a repeater to my router, which is out of range. The setup runs stable and had to be restarted about three times in the last weeks. The only disatvantage is a layer of about 1mm water after heavy rain. This decreases the SNR by 2 dB.
Wolfgang
LOL! on the water!
The big difference is that I take the RF to the SDR which is inside the house via low-loss coax. so the SDR & the chip are not exposed to the cold weather ( I can fit the whole thing with a battery in that same sandwich box if I want)
the elevation of INMARSAT 3-F5 is 27 degrees from where I am
I’m in Annapolis, MD, at 39 deg N lat. I have my Lantern under an upside down standard kitchen polyethylene food storage container. Being open on the bottom eliminates water build up. I have it tied down so wind and my cat won’t knock it off the deck railing. Ken
Ken
HQ is inside of one of the early Lantern enclosures. Just hanging out on the roof.
-16C/4F right now.
Boy you are right, you do have a metric ton of space on the roof.
-C
It’s a building that is over an acre in size; Motorola’s old R&D facility. We work out of this space: http://www.mhubchicago.com/
very cool!
Hello community!
Here’s my setup for the antenna. From my northerly location I can “see” the Alphasat at 25E which has the Outernet service. I also have an access to Inmarsat at 64E (Indian Ocean Region) which has more interesting services.
The problem was to have a weather / winter proof enclosure for the antenna and LNA, preferably with pan and tilt control to achieve maximum dB’s on these higher latitudes.
IP65 plastic box, 3D printed pan-tilt servo mount, Arduino Nano and bluetooth module to the rescue!
I’m now able to pan roughly 40 degrees left and right and about 20 degrees up, which is fine up here!
Please see my album at Enclosure and Pan-Tilt mount for patch antenna - Album on Imgur
And couple of videos:
And Youtube links:
Absolutely Brilliant!! Congrats!
The videos don’t work for me (No Video with supported format & MIME type found) , but I looked at all the stills
BTW do you know the frequency the the EGC messages are on on 25E? I can see the 3 Aero signals easily, but I have yet to find the EGC …
Thanks!
Regarding to the EGC channel: I strongly think there’s no EGC channel on Alphasat (25E). A again, I think I receive it from Inmarsat at 64 East (1537.100 MHz). Here’s a reasonable list of frequencies around these bands and satellites: http://www.uhf-satcom.com/lband/
My last post is now edited with Youtube links
That’s really a great piece of engineering!
very nice!!! I am doing something similar in the next day or so. I 3d printed my gimble and installed the servos. I have manual control over them right now but am installing a gps and digital compass so that it can be “auto pointing”.
I will be putting the antenna on the outside of the box due to wanting it to be able to do a 360 degree rotation. have installed the slip-ring that will be driven by a stepper. I want to test it for a mobile application. for no other reason than to see if I can make it work.
the videos are impressive too! Thanks
and thanks for the info… I can’t see 65E from my location as the actual house is in the way! 
any more pictures/info about the heatsinks ?
