The backyard groundstation consists of a 2.3m diameter dish antenna from Unimesh and an old Egis rotor and controller. This whole setup was acquired at a very reasonable cost from the saltmine as it was surplus to their requirements. The idea is to play around with AO-40, possibly receiving SA satellite TV and maybe some astronomy if James gets his way.
This is what the setup looked like. With the dish resting against the garden shed and a spade used to set the dish to the correct angle we were able to hear AO40.
This is a closeup of the feed and downconverter assembly. Note the wires holding the feed to the four dish struts. Someday I will get a program to rotate these images to save you from tilting your neck.
Unfortunately no pictures of this setup as James wasn't around. The setup worked a treat. Used a SATPC32 on a laptop (not mine!) to automate the tracking. Could give all my attention to tuning around in the passband of AO40. Heard a few European stations and also a German station operating from ZS1-country! Signals were quite noisy, not sure why, could be a number of things, will have to look at it again. Took the whole setup down again as it may be a bit of an eyesore to the neighbours. Will have put it up again when I can do a better job.