Show HN: EZ-TRAK Satellite Hand Tracking Suite | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: EZ-TRAK Satellite Hand Tracking Suite

github.com

41 pointsbenbojangles13 comments

EZ-TRAK is a comprehensive satellite tracking suite designed for amateur radio operators, weather satellite enthusiasts, and educational purposes. The software interfaces with an EZ-TRAK BLE device which is mounted to a lightweight foldable portable satellite dish antenna to hand track satellites in real-time, providing azimuth and elevation data for optimal antenna positioning.

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When you say "hand track", you're not kidding.

I was expecting something with motors controlled by a person, but this is literally picking up the dish and pointing it by muscle power.

Back of envelope, a 1 meter parabolic antenna at 1.7 GHz gives about 12 degree beam width (FWHM), which is what makes this practical. Very clever.

Neat project! I've always wanted to try downlinking data from satellites because it just seems like magic. I wonder what sort of reactions you'd get from setting this up in a backpack/cyberdeck and walking around pointing a satellite dish at the sky.

My garden neighbours think I'm up to no good and probably think I'm a spy

Really cool project! What kind of foldable dish do you use?

it's called a farabrella kinda a diy thing made from faraday fabric weighs about 350gr for a 1m diameter dish. They are available on ebay.

Thanks I'll check it out!

I guess I'm just too far down the motion-capture rabbit hole, but I first interpreted this phrase as "tracking hands by satellite" rather than "tracking satellites by hand". I think purely linguistically (without any context that it's going to be easier for a hand to track a satellite than a satellite to track a hand) it's likely to be interpreted that way, also.

Am I missing something or is this repo devoid of the code mentioned in the README?

I don't think it's being given away for free sorry about that

Aren't you the author? What are you showing HN here? There are special rules for Show HN.

> Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.

> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

what are you trying to say exactly. Can you be more specific?

While I'm not sure it runs afoul of the Show HN rules linked, it may given the referenced repository[1] isn't public. The linked repository from this post[2] and the YouTube video[3] might be sufficient.

But I agree it's a little disappointing to not see the code behind the demo.

[1] https://github.com/benb0jangles/EZ-TRAK.git

[2] https://github.com/benb0jangles/EzTrak

[3] https://youtu.be/2A2lW0ONNiE

there are demo versions added now

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