With an old dish we can build a directional 2.4Ghz antenna to receive the balloon Telemetry.
First of all we need to find an old antenna.
In this case we are going to use a 80 cm antenna. The typical dish diameter in Spain for Astra or Hotbird satellites.
As you can imagine we are going to take profit of the dish, the satellite antenna uses a lower frequency than 2.4Ghz and that's why we are going to change for a new one (See Figure 2).
Unmounting the antenna we can see it is 40 mm diameter (See figure 1). great! 40 mm is an standard PVC pipe diameter.
After cutting around 15 cm of PVC pipe (See Figure 4) You can see the Satellite antenna clamp adjust perfectly (See Figure 3).
The Satellite antenna is more or less where the white plastic cap starts (See Figure 5) to maintain the new 2.4Ghz antenna at the same distance we cut the cap where we are going to place the antenna (See Figure 7) trying to maintain the same distance as the old (See Figure 6).
Now we have the cap to place the new antenna, We cut a ring of the 40 mm pipe to put inside the cap and then we place the receiver to see the position to do the hole to pass the antenna(See Figure 8 and 9), if your receiver has an integrated antenna this step is not necesary because PVC is transparent for 2.4Ghz waves. Mark the antenna position to make the hole.
Figure 13
Next step is measure the diameter of the antenna (Figure 11) and make a hole with the drill (Figure 12) to place the antenna and receiver (Figure 13 and 14).
Next Step is to connect the receiver with an Arduino Nano, this controller is a gateway to send the information via USB to the computer.
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