Welcome to part 2 of the satellite dish teardown. Today we will be looking at the feed horn of the satellite dish that has spent the last 10 years being an ornament on my house. This will include looking at the radome, the shape of the feed horn and the internal features to make it work well.
SATELLITE DISH TEARDOWN
So, this weekend was a perfectly normal weekend at the home of Swamphen Enterprises. It was one of those weekends spent sorting out all those things in the house you never quite get round to doing. One of these was deal with the satellite dish that the previous owner had left attached to the wall, but with the cable cut. This satellite dish has been acting as a decoration for the last 10 or so years, and it was time for this to end. You will be familiar with this dish, as it starred as one of my #AntennaInTheWild tweets and in my reflector blog post about how a perforated dish can act as a solid piece of metal: https://swamphen.co.uk/new-blog/2019/6/10/when-a-grid-becomes-a-solid. Having removed it from its long-held position, it was only fair to do a teardown of it!
CHOOSE YOUR RADOME WISELY
The word radome is a portmanteau of the words radar and domes, they are designed to cover an antenna and protect it from the elements. Growing up near the golf balls in the North York Moors I have known about radomes for a long time, and always found them fascinating. I was really happy that one of the first jobs I had when I started in engineering was to ‘just look after’ the design and manufacture of a new radome. It was supposed to be just a part time occupation for a few weeks. However, it turned into a full-time job of several years to get a good radome design that could be repeatably manufactured and worked well with my antenna. In this blog I am going to look at different types of radome shape, material and thickness.