Over on YouTube, Gabe from the saveitforparts channel has uploaded a video where he tests out his Discovery Drive and Discovery Dish with L-Band feed for creating sky heatmaps of L-band satellites.
If you were unaware, Discovery Drive is our sister company KrakenRF's most recent successful crowdfunding campaign, which was successfully funded a couple of weeks ago. Discovery Drive is a portable antenna rotator with low power requirements, designed for use with Discovery Dish and other antennas of similar size and weight.
In the video, Gabe writes a custom script that has the Discovery Drive sweep the sky while simultaneously taking RF power readings with the Discovery Dish and L-band feed. The result is an image showing where L-band satellites are in the sky. He goes on to conduct experiments with the hydrogen line and sun imaging, as well as with satellites at UHF frequencies.
Thanks to weather satellite enthusiast 'Heja Ali' who wrote in to share some welcome news. On February 12, 2026, Roscosmos successfully launched Elektro-L No.5 aboard a Proton-M rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, the fifth in the Elektro-L series of Russian geostationary weather satellites (following No.1 in 2011, No.2 in 2015, No.3 in 2019 and No.4 in 2023). Like its predecessors, it carries an unencrypted 1691 MHz L-band downlink with both LRIT and HRIT imagery.
The interesting consequence for amateur satellite enthusiasts is what happens next. Per SatDump's satellite list, L5 is now commissioning at 76°E (L3's old slot), L4 is operational at 165.75°E, and the European slot at 14.5°W is currently held by L2, which has lost its L-band transmitter to a power supply failure. Once L5 is fully operational, L3 is expected to drift west to 14.5°W to replace L2, finally restoring an unencrypted geostationary L-band downlink to the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal, western France, and Spain for the first time since EUMETSAT switched off Meteosat HRIT in 2018.
The Electro-L 1691 MHz signal is easily received by an RTL-SDR Blog V3 or V4, LNA, and a modest 65 cm dish. Our Discovery Dish with the L-band weather satellite feed is a good choice, with existing users in southern Europe routinely pulling Elektro-L3 at 5 to 6 dB SNR using SatDump (which only needs around +1 dB to decode).
There is no firm public timeline yet for L3's drift west, but if you are in far-western Europe and have been waiting on a geostationary L-band satellite to become available, now is a good time to start planning for the receive hardware.
Receiving Electro-L Satellite Imagery With SatDump
Over on YouTube Manuel from the 'Build a Cubesat' channel has uploaded a video testing a prototype version of our Discovery Drive antenna rotator. If you are unaware, Discovery Drive is our new antenna rotator product for applications like satellite tracking and general antenna positioning that is currently being crowd-funded over on Crowd Supply. There are two days left in the campaign.
In the video, Manuel overviews the Discovery Drive, shows the internals, and walks us through the web UI. He goes on to show how it can be set up with the SatNOGS project. The SatNOGS project has volunteers set up ground-based satellite stations, and anyone can use those stations to log an observation anywhere in the world.
We note that he mentioned some trouble with getting SatNOGS to rotate the Discovery Drive over zenith. We have added a note to our Wiki showing how this can be fixed by specifying the correct rotational limits for the Discovery Drive.
Our Discovery Drive campaign is currently being crowd-funded on Crowd Supply. Please consider ordering a unit if you are interested in a high-quality, low-power, and portable antenna rotator. Below is an update from the campaign exploring a potential use-case for measuring antenna gain patterns:
In this update, we’ll examine an alternative use case: measuring antenna gain radiation patterns.
One interesting use of a capable Az/El rotator is to measure the radiation pattern of various antennas. This is normally done in an anechoic chamber, but if you have a large enough open space, it can be done cheaply with a rotator and signal source.
To test this as a proof of concept, we used Claude code to very quickly create a tool that could help us create an antenna pattern plot. The software tool simply rotates the antenna on the Discovery Drive one step at a time, measures the SNR using an RTL-SDR, and plots the reading on a graph. To be clear, this simple setup is not providing any sort of calibrated readings, but it will at least give you an idea of what the radiation pattern and performance of an antenna looks like.
In our test, we mounted a TV Yagi on the Discovery Drive and used our software to plot the radiation pattern at 433 MHz. As expected from a Yagi, we see higher gain at the front and lower gain at the rear.
Antenna Gain Results
Due to a lack of a suitable open area, this test was performed in a small backyard and, hence, the radiation pattern is a little lopsided due to multipath. In this test, we also used a simple omnidirectional antenna for the signal source, which exacerbated the multipath. A way to improve this test would be to use a directional antenna on the transmit side, too.
We will release this open-source tool for others to play with, but please be aware that it was only created for proof of concept. However, if there is interest, we can continue to refine it.
Below is a photo of the physical setup. A HackRF with Portapack and whip antenna are mounted on a tripod a few meters away, while the Discovery Drive carries a Yagi antenna. As the Discovery Drive rotates the Yagi through 0 to 360° in azimuth and -30 to 90° in elevation, it measures the received power at each step.
Over on YouTube, Gabe from the saveitforparts channel has uploaded a new video testing a prototype of our upcoming Discovery Drive Az/El antenna rotator, which is now live for crowdfunding on Crowd Supply.
In the video, Gabe unboxes the Discovery Drive and sets it up with a Discovery Dish. He then tests it on various weather satellites, including Meteor M2-4, Meteor M2-3, DMSP, Metop-B, and Metop-C. Later in the video, Gabe shows that you can also attach an Arrow Yagi antenna to the mount and notes that in a future video, he hopes to test CubeSat and Amateur radio satellite reception with the Yagi.
Thank you to Alex P for writing in and sharing with us his detailed evaluation of the Discovery Dish 1420 MHz hydrogen line feed when paired with a low-cost 1m WiFi grid dish. The goal was to see how well this near off-the-shelf setup performs as a hydrogen line radio telescope. The Discovery Dish feed integrates the dipole very close to the internal LNA and filters to minimize losses, uses a weather-sealed enclosure, and is built around a low-noise Qorvo QPL9547 amplifier, which has a very low noise figure at 1420 MHz.
Alex used 4NEC2 with a simple geometry approximation to analyze the beam pattern and also experimentally determined the optimal feed-to-dish spacing for the WiFi grid. The results show that the Discovery Dish feed significantly outperformed a more standard feed + external LNA setup.
Alex also shows how he uses aluminum foil, or conductive foam, to shield the feed from all signals during a background correction scan. Generally, for background correction scans, we recommend pointing towards a cold area of the sky (any area far away from the Milky Way with little to no hydrogen), but Alex prefers this method.
Discovery Dish 1420 MHz Hydrogen Line Feed Tested on a WiFi Grid Dish
The Wow! signal is a famous, strong, and unexplained radio signal detected in 1977 by the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio, lasting 72 seconds and appearing to originate from the constellation Sagittarius. Its origin remains unknown, with some speculating that it could be an extraterrestrial technosignature. Upon reviewing the signal data, Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered the powerful signal burst in the readout and wrote a large "Wow!" next to it, unintentionally coining the name.
A network of small radio telescopes offers several distinct advantages compared to large professional observatories. These systems are low-cost and can operate autonomously around the clock, making them ideal for continuous monitoring of transient events or long-duration signals that professional telescopes cannot commit to observing full-time.
Their geographic distribution enables global sky coverage and coordinated observations across different time zones, which is especially valuable for validating repeating or time-variable signals. Coincidence detection across multiple stations helps reject local radio frequency interference (RFI), increasing confidence in true astrophysical or technosignature transient events.
These networks are also highly scalable, resilient to single-point failures, and capable of rapid response to external alerts. Furthermore, they are cost-effective, engaging, and accessible, ideal for education, citizen science, and expanding participation in radio astronomy.
However, these systems also come with notable limitations when compared to professional telescopes. They have significantly lower sensitivity, limiting their ability to detect faint or distant sources. Their angular resolution is poor due to smaller dish sizes and wide beamwidths, making precise source localization difficult.
Calibration can be inconsistent across stations, and frequency stability or dynamic range may not match the performance of professional-grade equipment. Additionally, without standardized equipment and protocols, data quality and interoperability can vary across the network.
Despite these constraints, when thoughtfully coordinated, such networks can provide valuable complementary observations to professional facilities.
The team note that the Wow! signal was strong enough that it could have been detected by a small home radio telescope. They go on to make the case that we could be missing out on detecting many compelling signals simply because radio telescopes aren't watching every part of the sky simultaneously.
The project will monitor the Hydrogen Line frequency for interesting signals. Currently, the team is using a WiFi grid dish and an external LNA as the radio telescope hardware, but they also aim to evaluate our Discovery Dish with H-Line feed.
Over on YouTube Matt from the Tech Minds YouTube channel has recently uploaded a new video where he tests out our Discovery Dish antenna. Discovery Dish is designed to be a low-cost, portable solution for receiving L-band and S-band weather satellites, Inmarsat satellites, conducting amateur hydrogen line radio astronomy, and more.
In the video, Matt unboxes the Discovery Dish and provides an overview of the build process before demonstrating its use in decoding AERO and STD-C messages on Inmarsat. He then shows the dish and Inmarsat feed being used to receive Iridium satellites, and how they can be decoded using iridium-extractor with a HackRF or Airspy R2.
Finally, Matt swaps out the Inmarsat feed for the Hydrogen Line feed. Using SDR#, the IF AVG plugin, and Stellarium, he was able to obtain a clear hydrogen line peak.
This Discovery Dish Is The ONLY Satellite Dish You Will Need!
