PROJECT STARGAZER

Team Members:
Dan Beard

Fall 2004 - Spring 2005

ELM4701/2 - ELM Project I&II

****PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION****

The Problem: To build an altitude and azmuth steerable satellite dish accurate to within half of a degree. Once this is complete than we hope to get the dish set up to transmit and recieve to the Ham radio satellites.

Our Solution:  We intend to enhance the dish with a second gear and motor, and to run a controller off of a piece of tracking software that we have avalible called Satellite Tool Kit. With position sensors telling us where the dish is pointed, we should have a very accurate finished product. Once we have gotten the dish moving correctly, we will move on to being able to transmit and recieve.

System Overview:  Forthcoming

Schedule:   Horribly behind schedule. we hope to catch up some over winter break.
                  
                 12/08/04: We have gotten approval to use one of the old dishes, we will get it taken down and put somewhere where we can work on it rather that on the roof of Green.

                 12/13/04: The dish is down, it took 3 hours and two professionals to get it down from the roof of Green, now that we can see what we have to do to this thing, progress should be constant.

                   Our Gant chart.

Brainstorming/Sketches

Research/Feasibility Testing: So far, the research that we have done has been presented in our tech topic presentations.
    The first tech topic was on position sensors. Position%20Sensors.ppt (a Powerpoint file)
    The second tech topic was on the physics behind Hall effect sensors. The Hall Effect

Design concepts and drawings (mechanical, electrical, software)

             The users manual for our project: (Not fully completed yet)

Status and Design Presentations: (these are powerpoint presentations)
             Design Presentation #1: given on Febuary 9th 2005
             Design Presentation #2: given on March 23rd 2005
             Final Design Presentation: To be given on April 24th 2005

Pictures

Related Links:
                   Carl Brandon's Web Page: http://www.sover.net/~cbrandon/cbrandon/
                   The producers of Satellite tool kit, AGI : WWW.AGI.com
                   Amateur Radio Relay League : http://www.arrl.org/