ISS and LEO satellites tracker

by freedom2000

Let's start by two video of a real ISS tracking in my home :) One at 16x speed and one much longer but with explainations ! https://youtu.be/MYff_J85vZo https://youtu.be/_7pX7NHbo6A So here is a moke up of a ground station antenna, able to track any LEO sat you want. The antenna is 3D printed from a design I made starting with a 6 meter dish antenna picture. The dish is now 20cm wide, has a real paraboloid shape and is moved by two stepper motors fully hidden into the pedestal of the antenna. Two hall effect sensors and two magnets allow to setup the antenna horizontal and pointing to north at boot time. They are also hidden into the structure. An ESP32 is also hidden in the basement and is the heart of the system. It computes the position of the satellites every 1ms and computes the azimuth and elevation angles from your antenna to the satellite. An android App allows to visualize the track and to send parameters to the antenna : which satellites to follow, the Two Lines Elements and the time. https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/iss-and-leo-satellites-tracker.123325/ The orbit propagator is embeded in the ESP32 and uses the excellent SGP4 library ported by hopperpop ! https://github.com/Hopperpop/Sgp4-Library the firmware was directly inspired by Alex Chang project : (Thanls Alex for sharing ) https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/alex_chang/satellite-tracker-13a9aa How to do it : Print the dish in two halves (brim may help !). Then glue both parts with epoxy glue. Sand, fill, re sand and paint it. print the support and twelve elements of the "umbrella" Glue the dish in place and center it into its base add the horn and its supports (beware they are fragile) add also the two rings into the slots to finish the dish print the three pieces of the foot but don't glue them together now. It will be easier to glue them when te whole ntenna will be finished ! Then print the azimuth shaft parts and use a 3mm leadscrew as the shaft. see stl template for the lenght. The