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Show HN: EZ-TRAK Satellite Hand Tracking Suite (github.com)

41 points by benbojangles ↗ HN
EZ-TRAK is a comprehensive satellite tracking suite designed for amateur radio operators, weather satellite enthusiasts, and educational purposes. The software interfaces with an EZ-TRAK BLE device which is mounted to a lightweight foldable portable satellite dish antenna to hand track satellites in real-time, providing azimuth and elevation data for optimal antenna positioning.

15 comments

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ooterness
When you say "hand track", you're not kidding.

I was expecting something with motors controlled by a person, but this is literally picking up the dish and pointing it by muscle power.

Back of envelope, a 1 meter parabolic antenna at 1.7 GHz gives about 12 degree beam width (FWHM), which is what makes this practical. Very clever.

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wkat4242
Really cool project! What kind of foldable dish do you use?
benbojangles
it's called a farabrella kinda a diy thing made from faraday fabric weighs about 350gr for a 1m diameter dish. They are available on ebay.
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Liftyee
Neat project! I've always wanted to try downlinking data from satellites because it just seems like magic. I wonder what sort of reactions you'd get from setting this up in a backpack/cyberdeck and walking around pointing a satellite dish at the sky.
benbojangles
My garden neighbours think I'm up to no good and probably think I'm a spy
hiatus
Am I missing something or is this repo devoid of the code mentioned in the README?
benbojangles
I don't think it's being given away for free sorry about that
hiatus
Aren't you the author? What are you showing HN here? There are special rules for Show HN.

> Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.

> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

benbojangles
what are you trying to say exactly. Can you be more specific?
lotyrin
I guess I'm just too far down the motion-capture rabbit hole, but I first interpreted this phrase as "tracking hands by satellite" rather than "tracking satellites by hand". I think purely linguistically (without any context that it's going to be easier for a hand to track a satellite than a satellite to track a hand) it's likely to be interpreted that way, also.