Teardown Session 38: Discovery Dish
** Big shout out to this Teardown Session sponsor: Qorvo! **
In this episode of the Teardown Sessions, we're speaking to Carl Laufer from RTL-SDR. They are running a Crowd Supply campaign for Discovery Dish, a system for weather and Inmarsat satellite reception, and hydrogen line radio astronomy for RTL-SDR users. The Discovery Dish aims to be the start of an ecosystem of hardware designed to get users set up with satellite reception, including a planned companion light-duty antenna rotator.
Key Moments
00:16 CS News and What's New
02:12 Introducing Carl, his SDR journey, and the blog and products it inspired
06:05 The Kraken SDR launch
08:07 Kraken SDR data visualization
09:45 Discovery Dish: Inspired by science coolness
11:10 The bands and feeds available to Discovery Dish
13:20 Watch out! Pirates!
15:05 Radio from the universe
16:13 How we know we live in a spiral galaxy
17:14 Demo of the prototype Discovery Dish in action
20:41 Checking out some competitors and early prototypes
28:02 Preview peek at the Discovery Dish mechanical rotator
30:42 The value of open source to the project, such as SatDump software
33:30 Preppers to pulsar detectives: who's using Discovery Dish for what
35:40 Competitor's mechanical rotators evaluated
39:40 Current state of the Discovery Dish rotator project
41:33 Demo of the CAD modules
42:55 Online resources for satellite reception and a gallery tour of signal visualizations
45:48 Infrared and other images of Earth from GOES and NOAA
50:02 Discovery Dish campaign update and contact info
50:48 Call for volunteer testers
About our Guest
Carl Laufer has been running RTL-SDR.COM (RTL-SDR Blog) for ten years. In that time he's created the RTL-SDR Blog V3 and V4, various accessory products, and uploaded many RTL-SDR related tutorials and stories on the blog that have helped popularize low cost, software defined radio.
In recent years he's teamed up with Syed Karim to start KrakenRF, a company that created the KrakenSDR, a five-channel coherent software defined radio for applications like radio direction finding. KrakenRF has recently started crowd funding for a new product called the Discovery Dish, which aims to make radio projects that require a satellite dish more accessible.
Links & Resources
/ rtlsdrblog
/ rtlsdrblog
/ @rtlsdrblog
/ @thekraken2086
Discovery Dish on Crowd Supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/...
Qorvo QPL9547 chip: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/...
SatDump open-source decoding software: https://www.satdump.org/
RTL-SDR Blog: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/
Qorvo RF Accelerator: https://www.crowdsupply.com/qorvo/rf-...
About the Teardown Sessions
Welcome to The Teardown Sessions, a series of interviews and hands-on learning sessions with Crowd Supply creators, staff, and lots of special guests. Crowd Supply is the crowdfunding platform of choice for engineers, hackers, designers, and idealists. We help them with the funding and support they need to deliver respectful, thoughtfully crafted, open source hardware to their delighted backers.
Come on by and see what our creators are making: https://www.crowdsupply.com.
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#opensourcehardware #hardwarehacking #opensource #hardware #teardown #maker #hacker #electronics #crowdsupply #crowdfunding #manufacturing #inmarsat #radioastronomy #qorvo #sdr #rtlsdr #weathersatellites