Automatic Satellite Dish Positioning for Line of Sight Communication using Bluetooth Technology

Satellite dishes are used to receive beams of signals from satellites and other broadcasting sources which arethen focused onto an antenna. The dish needs to be adjusted to get the desired azimuth and elevation formaximum signal reception. To overcome the difficulty of adjusting it manually, it would be beneficial to have asystem that aligns the satellite receiver by mechanical means while allowing the user to interact with the systemremotely to achieve a line of sight communication with the satellite source of interest. This paper proposesthe design and development of a system which receives user specifications from an Android application viaBluetooth by either specifying the direction of orientation of the dish or selecting a satellite of interest. Acontrol system interacting with the developed user interface achieves this. It employs a microcontroller, a GPSdevice, a compass and two servo motors to manage the orientation of the dish on its horizontal and verticalaxes. The Smartphone utilizes its Bluetooth socket to communicate with the Bluetooth module interfacedto the microcontroller. A database containing information on available satellites is included in the Androidapplication which is transferred to the microcontroller for computation of azimuth and elevation angleswhen the GPS coordinates and compass headings are obtained from their respective devices. Tests carriedout showed positive results for control of the orientation of the satellite dish in various directions over a 50mradius. The automatic adjustment functionality provided precise direction for line of sight communicationwhen users chose their satellite of focus