Alpha Adhito

Wow, what a superb thread. This is a literal gold mine for amateur radio astronomy I'm looking for 😅. Thanks a lot everyone!

As previously mentioned, for amateur radio astronomy (esp. on the H-Line), you don't actually need the extreme precision of optical astronomy do as most dish would give you few degrees of field of view. I'm a complete beginner in the subject so I'm using whatever available on the observatory where I work. Here you can see I'm using a Celestron CGX for mounting a 2.3 m dish (as the mount was the least used by the students) and mostly I'm using it as an extremely fancy tripod and don't even switch on the mount, then used the Mk. I eyeball for pointing the dish 😅 (sometimes I just pointed the dish up and let the sky drift overhead). The dish, although really huge weighs just over 7 kg so I still have a lot of room for the mount. For calibration you can point it to the sun and match the feedhorn shadow to the center of the dish and click align to the sun in the software. In the future I might build an Alt-Az mount using antenna rotator or some gearbox and stepper motor then coupled it with OnStep. Satellite tracking is the next subject I'm interested, the 1420 MHz feed is adequate for most L-Band satellite reception🙂.