Hi guys.
I work for a company that wants to create a good auto-pointing satellite dish - a dish that can automatically find the satellite it should be pointing at. I am a software engineer, and don’t have too much experience with satellites, so I was hoping someone here could point me in the right direction.
The satellite my company works with the most is Galaxy 16, but there may be other satellites we might need it to find as well.
From what I understand (what I’ve been told), what we need is a small computer that can control the motors on the dish, and is also connected to a DVB-S2 tuner, so it can tell if the satellite is pointing where it should be. If it’s not on signal, it keeps moving the motors until it gets something.
My portion of the project has nothing to do with the operation of the motors - I don't know much about motors, and we have engineers for that. I just need to figure out how to make the DVB tuner work.
I’ve been trying to read up on satellite communication technology, but having very little background in it, it’s proving fairly difficult to wrap my head around it. What exactly is a DVB tuner? Do we really need one if we’re not actually trying to decode the satellite signal (watch satellite TV or anything) - just lock on to the satellite? All we need the DVB tuner to do is to tell us 2 things:
- Is it looking at the right satellite?
- How good is the signal?
So we can fine-tune the motors to point at the optimal spot
Is there a better device than a DVB Tuner that can do this? Preferably a device that relatively small (closer to the size of a fist than the size of a set-top box), can plug into a computer with USB, and has an extremely fast response time so that the motors don’t have to stop and wait for the device to figure out if it’s on signal or not. Or is a TV tuner exactly what we need?
The computer will be running Linux, so we would need something that has good Linux support. We can write the software to move the motors until it finds the signal, as long as we can poll the device and get a fast response from it.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I am pretty far out of my depth here.
