What can be done from an old TV plate. DIY satellite dish

You can not rush to throw away old satellite dishes. Having the necessary equipment and tools available, you will be able to make a chair and a comfortable chair out of them. They will look very futuristic. How exactly to do everything, see the master class.

materials

To make a chair and a chair from a satellite dish with your own hands, prepare:

• old satellite dishes, 4 pcs.;
• old office chair;
• a piece of plywood;
• foam rubber for furniture upholstery;
• upholstery material;
• fasteners;
• primer;
• paint;
• grinder;
• furniture stapler;
• scissors;
• jigsaw or saw;
• welding machine;
• metal cutting tool.

Step 1. Your existing satellite dishes must be cleaned and completely disassembled. No items need to be thrown away. Almost all of them are useful, as they consist of durable and high-quality steel.

Step 2. To the details already received, you should add the base part of the office chair, which allows it to turn and recline. To do this, you will need to completely disassemble the chair, leaving the metal base.

Step 3. Take two dishes from the antennas. On one of them, cut a small semicircle from the edge, fitting it under another plate. Weld them together. This will be the back with a headrest for the future chair.

Step 4. To the seat, which will be a large dish from the antenna, weld the upper part of the part from the office chair with a swivel mechanism. Weld another part designed to support the backrest to a workpiece of two plates.

Step 5. Attach square steel tubes to the seat to stabilize the chair. From the pipes, make a cross rack and reinforce everything with metal supports. What should happen in the end, you can see in the photo.

Step 6. To strengthen the backrest support, weld flat metal parts to it. You will find them in the components of the antenna.

Step 7. To another plate, weld the footrest from the chair. The resulting piece of furniture will become an additional element on which, sitting on a chair, you can put your feet for convenience. If necessary, also stabilize it with metal pipes from the antennas.

Step 8. Slightly curved pipes from the antenna will make excellent armrests and further strengthen the entire structure. They should be adjusted in size to the resulting chair and welded.

Step 9. Now the chair needs to add some softness. To do this, cut circles out of plywood. Upholster them with soft foam rubber, pulling fabric upholstery or material made of natural or artificial leather on top.

Satellite dish is a common but expensive pleasure. Many of us often thought about the question: is it possible to make such a multifunctional antenna on our own? Of course, it is quite possible! Most often, the question of making a satellite dish with their own hands is asked by people in order to save money or those who like to conduct experiments. Building a homemade TV-dish is not as easy as it seems. When installing it, you need to take into account not only the features of a particular model, but even the smallest nuances: setting available satellites, reflection angle, and others. Today we will tell you how to make a satellite dish with your own hands from quite affordable improvised means. Let's look at the most common ways to make such a device.

Method of gluing with a concrete base

When making a homemade satellite dish, do not forget to draw a detailed drawing of the device, taking into account all measurements and calculations of consumables, in order to get the desired result. It is thanks to your accurate calculations and values ​​that you will save yourself from the risk of getting an irregular shape and similar unforeseen troubles.

The whole manufacturing process of such equipment is as follows:

• We draw a parabola in the drawing, which will be transferred a little later to a steel sheet 0.05 cm thick.
• Using a welding machine, we make a frame from metal rods with a diameter of 10 mm. We bend the steel ribs along the knife, and then weld the bearing to the top of the structure.
• Install the frame on a flat surface. We mount the pipe vertically in the center under the mounted bearing. After fixing the part, install the knife on the bearing of the large washer.
• We fill the plate with a thick concrete solution.
• We dry the resulting matrix for 4-5 days (preferably in the open air).
• Now we make gluing the antenna. We divide the finished structure into several parts. We have 8 sectors.

Important! This is necessary in order to slightly facilitate the further process of work. Do not forget to follow the same interval between the elements of the matrix.

• We use for the pattern a special fiberglass, cut into identical strips, and an epoxy primer. We apply ordinary machine oil to the surface of the already dry matrix, and then put the washer in the installed pipe. We lubricate the matrix with resin, on which we apply a strip of fiberglass. We smooth the applied component with our hands so that bubbles do not appear on the surface of the glued matrix.
• Cover the reflector with aluminum foil.

That's all the work. Such a satellite dish can be used for its intended purpose.

Do-it-yourself satellite dish at home from foil

It happens that the location of the house does not allow the use of a parabolic dish, so you can build a similar antenna with your own hands. It is extremely important to take into account the following basic requirements for this homemade device:

• The need for a TV tower remoteness of 30-50 km from your home.
• The signal must have sufficient reception of at least a few satellites.
• It is desirable that there is a tall building next to your home - it will be easier to cope with the task.

Materials and tools:

• Old umbrella.
• A roll of plain foil.
• Antenna cable (preferably copper).
• Can.
• Amplifier with built-in power supply.

Manufacturing:

• We make a satellite array. We measure the interval between all the spokes of the umbrella, the central angle of their attachment and the height of the segment we need.
• We cut out all the details from the foil, apply them to the triangular parts of the umbrella and sew them with nylon threads to the existing fabric. With similar manipulations, we sheathe the entire inside of the umbrella with foil.
• Let's start assembling the signal receiver. We install it in the focus of the satellite array. To do this, you can use the purchased amplifier, or you can make it yourself. To do this, remove 4 cm of braid from the cable, cut off the noise-protective layer and leave one central copper core, which will transmit the television signal.
• We cut out an oval part from a beer can, in the center of which we make a small hole. We insert a ready-made cable core into it and solder this contact. We close the connections with ordinary plasticine to avoid oxidation and corrosion during the operation of the device.
• We attach the resulting receiving apparatus to the handle of the umbrella with ordinary tape, we wind the cable 10-15 cm so that in the future you can adjust the focus of the mirror.

Important! Make sure that the receiver does not come into contact with the metal handle of the umbrella, as this may cause a lot of noise interference. To protect the device from such troubles, we put plasticine in the zone of possible contact, which will serve as a kind of insulator.

• We have a home-made power supply close to the TV, since our amplifying device will be powered through an antenna cable.
• We fix the plate with a nylon thread or the upper central tip of the umbrella. We direct it to a nearby source (tower), and then select the focus as a receiver, which came as a signal to our TV.

DIY satellite dish at home from a thin metal sheet

It is not difficult to make such a satellite dish with your own hands, it is only important to follow the instructions and purchase one sheet of thin galvanized metal, the thickness of which should be a maximum of 1.5 mm, and the dimensions should be 100x100 mm. From such a sheet, you can make a homemade plate with a diameter of 80 mm.

Step-by-step algorithm of actions:

• We pick up the cardboard of the size we need, and then divide it into 16 identical round parts.

Important! Please note that each sector should be offset from the previous one by about 22 mm.

• We draw 4 circles with the following radii: 75, 254, 400, 538 mm. Due to the fact that the last circle goes beyond the cardboard blank, we simply cut off all the extra parts. According to the obtained circles, we will continue to bend our template.
• We make cuts along 16 rays, adhering to the same distance - C1, C2, C3 and C4. Size C1 - 0 mm, C 2 - 11 mm, C 3 - 29 mm, C4 - 50 mm.
• We transfer the cutouts made to the metal sheet using a metal ruler and a sharp scriber.
• Next, we cut out the previously made blank of the future plate with scissors for metal.
• We connect together all the metal petals. So we got a finished mirror for our satellite dish.

How to make a satellite dish at home from wire?

To make such homemade equipment, you will need a large inflatable ball, which will serve as a model for the frame of our future wire antenna.

The manufacturing technique is as follows:

1. We mark on the ball with a pencil the largest radius of our satellite dish. The curved surface will represent that part of the ball that is separated by a circle.
2. We pick up a coil of copper (preferably) wire with a diameter of 3 mm (you can take it from an old transformer), and then we make circle No. 1 out of it, which we put on our ball.
3. Now we make wire circle #2 a little larger in size so that the interval between it and the previous one is about 20 mm. So we will gradually reach the desired maximum diameter.
4. We connect the finished circles with rays so that the places of their intersection are twisted with a thick wire and soldered in a tin way.
5. Leave empty space inside the smallest circle. This is where the antenna stand will be attached.
6. We cover the finished frame with an aluminum mesh (you can use foil), observing the rear curvilinearity of the reflective structure.

DIY satellite dish made of plexiglass

Plexiglas is great for making a homemade satellite dish, since with moderate heating this material has excellent plasticity, due to which it can take absolutely any shape. For work, we took one sheet of plexiglass 3 mm thick and with a larger diameter than the diameter of the factory satellite device.

A step-by-step master class on making a satellite dish with your own hands from plexiglass:

1. After softening the material under the action of heat, we level it on a blank, giving the plexiglass a round shape. Now we are waiting for the cooling of the material.
2. We glue the concave surface of the material used evenly with thin foil. In our case, the foil will be a reflective element.

Do-it-yourself satellite dish is ready! Now you can set up channels!

At the end of the twentieth century, satellite television quickly burst into our homes and began to improve just as rapidly. Not everyone probably remembers the first Soviet-made satellite receivers from Krosna! It was a huge unit, on which only 8 channels could be tuned by rotating the wheels of variable resistors. But progress in this area has led to the fact that the equipment for receiving satellite television has become rapidly aging. The analog signal was replaced by a digital MPEG-2 standard, and now it is already living its last days, after the introduction of the MPEG-4 standard, which MPEG-2 receivers can no longer receive and decode ...

Naturally, in the hands of the population, as well as in landfills, analog as well as digital satellite receivers of early models began to rapidly accumulate. For ordinary people, this is just rubbish, but for us radio amateurs, it is a rather valuable source of parts, cases in which you can assemble some kind of device, connectors, power cords, transformers and ready-made power supplies.

And oddly enough, analog receivers may be of greater interest to radio amateurs, because they were assembled on full-sized components and, having not a small current consumption, had power supplies and decent power transformers. You can also profit from displays, high-frequency units and ordinary capacitors, resistances, transistors, diodes, etc. in them.

It all depends on what state the unit is in and what its configuration is, sometimes it can be used as a clock, a timer with an actuator, but some devices can be used in a more interesting way.

We are talking about tuners with a built-in positioner. A positioner is an electronic device designed to rotate a satellite dish along the orbital axis to various satellites with memorization of their positions and subsequent turn of the dish to these positions by supplying a supply voltage of +/- 48 volts to the actuator. The actuating mechanism is a DC electric motor with a gearbox and a retractable stem. They come with a retractable part of various lengths: 8-12-18-24-32 inches and are quite powerful, for example, I know of cases when, on a jammed rotary mechanism, the motor bent the channel ten! There were also tuners with a dual positioner designed to orient the antenna in both the horizontal and vertical axes.

What is the main idea of ​​this review: what can be learned from these devices and how can they be applied in case of preserved performance. If the tuner with a positioner has retained its performance as a positioner (analogue), it can be used for its intended purpose as a positioner, as well as for opening doors, gates, orienting a solar panel, etc. If all the electronics are burned out and cannot be restored, but the transformer remains intact, a pair of transformer - motor can be used for the same processes, but with your electronic filling.

The article provided photographs of 2 old receivers and you yourself will evaluate their filling. One of them is an analog Mirage 2200 with a double positioner. I inserted a 3-position toggle switch into it so that I could supply power from it to the engine, without the participation of a positioner.

In a modern home, you want to be able to watch TV, and preferably without interference, and even better in HD quality. And use the internet too.

In this photo you see 2 antennas: a satellite dish for the TV and a 4G antenna for the Internet. Let's talk a little more about this.

TV antennas - satellite and terrestrial

Surely, many have long known how satellite TV works and what you need to start watching news in high quality. But for sure there are those who have not thought about it before, that's just for them this part of the article will be useful, where everything will be laid out in a simple and understandable language. In addition, let's talk about digital DVB-T2 television, which can be watched using a conventional antenna.

So, if you want to watch hundreds of channels with news, movies and other programs, you will need a satellite dish.

In this photo, the Lans plate, it seems, is 80 centimeters in diameter. The range of antennas starts from a diameter of 55 cm, if I'm not confused, and the larger the dish, the more confident the reception of the satellite signal. It is advisable to use 80-90 cm plates, then even in bad weather (snowfall or heavy rain) the picture on the TV will not “crumble”, that is, there will be no interference.

Antenna "in the hole" - there are small holes over the entire area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe dish. This is necessary in order to reduce the wind load. Such a perforated antenna will not be swayed by the wind and certainly will not be torn off during a squall. It's a little more expensive, but it's justified.

The antenna must be installed so that it is directed to the satellite. Literally every millimeter counts. For example, the NTV + satellite is located in the south, so the antenna is hung on the facade that faces that direction. It is not necessary to hang the antenna on the house, it can also hang on a fence or on a tree, in some cases this is generally the only way to “catch” a signal - visibility must be direct, tall trees often interfere. When we install an antenna, we make sure to set it up and check the signal with a special device!

A so-called converter is fixed on a metal rack. It is needed to convert the satellite signal, it is to this little thing with an orange cap that the antenna cable is connected, which will go to the TV. Converters are different, some can only connect one cable (one TV), some two, some four. Perhaps there are models with more outputs, but I doubt that someone needs more than 4 TVs.

What you need besides the dish antenna

The satellite dish does not connect directly to any TV. There are 2 options:

1. Connecting the cable to a special receiver. This is a separate box with its own remote control, which connects to any TV, like a DVD player or VCR. It is used to convert the satellite signal from the antenna into a television signal. Decodes it. A special smart card is inserted into this box, which you buy from the operator (for example, Tricolor or NTV +), this is necessary to pay for access to the selected TV channel packages.
2. On sale there are TVs with a special CL + slot into which you can buy and insert a CAM module. This TV has an input for a DVB-S2 antenna cable. That is, the cable from the antenna is connected directly to the TV, a module is inserted into the TV, a smart card is inserted into the module. This option is convenient - there are no extra wires and an extra "box", and most importantly, everything is controlled by one remote control. If in the previous version it was necessary to turn on the TV and adjust the sound with one remote control, and change channels with another, then here all control is on one remote control and it's great.

At the construction stage, it is advisable to limit yourself to buying only an antenna with a converter, fix it on the facade or on the roof, adjust the position in order to receive a reliable signal from the satellite and bring the required number of cables into the house. Each TV is connected with a separate antenna cable and each TV needs its own receiver / module and its own smart card. By the way, each TV is also paid separately ... Therefore, most often the cable from the dish is connected to the living room, where a large TV will appear in the future.

Thus, after finishing the finishing, it remains only to connect the cable to the TV with the module or the receiver, you no longer need to climb onto the roof and touch the antenna.

Digital TV without satellite dish: DVB-T2

Some time ago, broadcasting of digital television in the DVB-T2 format began. Modern TVs already have a built-in receiver for this type of signal. It differs from the good old antenna in that there is no "snow" and interference. If the reception is confident, the picture will be very clear.

Reception is carried out on a similar antenna. At the time of writing, 20 channels are broadcast in digital format. These are 2 so-called multiplexes, 10 channels each. A multiplex is something like a package of channels that is broadcast on a specific frequency. These are on-air channels and they are broadcast free of charge.

If your TV does not have a built-in digital receiver, separate receivers are sold (“boxes” like those needed for satellite TV), you can connect such a box to any, even an old TV and watch TV channels in good quality.

You can read more about digital TV here: http://www.rtrs.ru/dtv/, and you can see the coverage area at this link.

Which is better, satellite or digital TV?

Satellite is better, digital is free, and in general, all modern television is junk, but let's still figure out the pros and cons.

So, on the satellite side, 100% coverage - you can receive a satellite signal anywhere, there would be a dish. It can be difficult only in the forest among centuries-old tall trees, but even there you can try to find a “window” and adjust the antenna. The range of TV channels is also on the side of satellite TV - there are hundreds of these channels. Movies, sports, news, educational programs, cartoons - choose what you want, just don't forget to pay on time. Actually, the need to pay is the main disadvantage, and payment for each connected TV.

And on the side of digital DVB-T2 television, there is a lower cost of the antenna, a lower cost of the receiver (or if the TV is fresh, then the receiver is already built into it), the absence of a subscription fee and the ability to connect any number of TVs to one antenna. However, you don’t have to pay a subscription fee for terrestrial channels on a satellite either, but on a satellite there is a choice, but not here. The disadvantages include not 100% coverage, there may not be reception somewhere or it will be too weak (see the link above) and only 20 channels. Maybe someday there will be more of them.

Many people put both antennas at once. Satellite is connected to a large TV in the living room, where you can watch movies, and a regular or digital antenna is connected to a TV in the kitchen or in the bedroom so that you can watch news on federal channels, for example.

Internet outside the city or 3G/4G antenna

Nowadays, good and fast Internet is already much more important than a TV, so let's talk about antennas for the Internet separately.

The photo shows a 3G/4G Proflink antenna. Why is she needed? What's good about her? Before answering these questions, it is worth delving a little into the problems of the mobile Internet.

If the mobile Internet on your modern smartphone is fast, and a regular USB modem is enough for a computer and the speed suits you, then you don’t need such an antenna, you don’t need to read further. But if everything works very slowly, and even with a good signal, the antenna can already help.

The principle of operation of 3G / 4G Internet is quite simple. In your or neighboring village, a telecom operator (Megafon, MTS, etc.) installs a base station. This is something like a large antenna to which your devices are connected - a phone or a modem. Your phone, the phone of the neighbor on the left, the neighbor on the right, the neighbor behind, across the street. They all need the Internet and they all share it with you. The fact is that the base station has a limited resource, bandwidth or "pipe" and it is divided approximately equally among everyone. Quite a bit, but not quite. There is the so-called concept of "radio resource", it is also limited. And this resource is needed the more, the worse the received signal on the subscriber device. Simply put, if your modem or phone is “bad”, there are only “one or two sticks”, the base station needs to spend more “strength” to provide you with good Internet access speed. If your signal is good or excellent, you need less strength = resources. These resources are also divided approximately equally, and all this is very rough and simplified.

The result is that those devices that have a better signal get a better speed. And this is only one side of the coin. Any mobile device, phone or modem is rather “weak”. If the operator's base station is a huge antenna on a mast or on the roof of a tall building, it emits a powerful signal, then the transmitter in your phone or modem is extremely small and it is difficult to “hear” the response signal from it to the base station. That is why your mail can be sent slowly, and uploading a video to Youtube is a whole problem.

What's the point of an antenna?

Well, now let's compare, what do you think receives the signal better - your phone or tablet in your hands, or the antenna on the roof of the house? What radiates better? Obviously, a large antenna pointed towards the operator's base station will be in better radio conditions and provide you with a better internet experience.

In addition to better reception, and therefore higher network access speed, the antenna in the photo above boasts built-in WiFi. Those two small antennas on top are just wireless communication in the house and on the site. You can connect any device with WiFi to such an antenna, and besides it, there is also a regular Ethernet cable (by the way, power is supplied through it, this is POE technology).

Therefore, if the Internet in your home does not work well, it makes sense to think about the antenna. This is not a panacea, in the event of a severe overload of the operator's network, it will not help much, but even then the Internet will work better, because the signal will become better.

At the request of customers, I install Proflink antennas, which are manufactured in Krasnodar http://smarten.rf/antenna/ These antennas are built on high-quality components, differ from analogues in a more reliable “stuffing”.