After finding that purchasing a tracking device for his satellite dish would be quite expensive, YouTuber “Tysonpower” decided to simply build one himself. What he came up is an assembly made with 3D-printed parts and extruded aluminum that uses a pair of NEMA23 stepper motors for movement.

While it doesn’t quite work with the dish itself due to its offset weight, the concept was successfully used to track weather satellites using a VHF Yagi antenna.

Control is provided via an Arduino Nano, which interfaces with a computer over USB serial that provides satellite information. You can check it out in the video below, and find more details in the project’s write-up.

Back in the days when you didn’t pay for your TV programming, it was common to have a yagi antenna on the roof. If you were lucky enough to have every TV station in the area in the same direction, you could just point the antenna and forget it. If you didn’t, you needed an antenna rotator. These days, rotators are more often found on communication antennas like ham radio beams. For terrestrial use, the antenna only needs to swing around and doesn’t need to change elevation. However, it does take a stout motor because wind loading can put a lot of force on the system.

[SP3TYF] has a HyGain AR-303 rotator and decided to build an Arduino-based controller for it. The finished product has an LCD and is able to drive a 24 V motor. You can control the azimuth of the antenna with a knob or via the computer.

[Waldemar Lewandowski] built a variant of the rotor (taking some additional ideas from [SQ9OUB]) and made a video of the device in operation (see below). The video is a little quiet, but you’ll get the ideas and you can see the original [SP3TYF] version’s code and documentation.

If you want to work satellites, you need an additional rotation axis. And if you think about it, rotating an antenna and moving a solar panel, probably have a lot in common — the sun is floating around in space, too.