Orbitron SX-10 Dish

[Houston Rockets]

Hello a while back a member (brex2001) had posted a picture of the scale for a Orbitron SX-10 Dish
I redid it today hopefully this will help anyone who has this dish and the scale is no longer on it...

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[telstar_1]

I did Orbitron 10' starting pre-1990 and 8.5' post-1991. Liked their design concept, clean looking. Also very compact in pre-assembled form. Based in Spring Green, Wis. and said to be designed by protege of FLW. Ribs were slid onto tabs on a central assembly plate, perimeter sections were bolted to ends of ribs and spliced to each other, and then the ribs were compressed between 2 center plates to form the structure. Something like 18 bare mesh panels were then placed between each of the ribs and secured with a locking strip. This was when almost all else was the 4-section stuff. Downside was that with enough force panels could be pushed out. Also they had a .3 f/d and rejected TI better.

The mount was equally unique with its "spin" declination setting. "Spinclination". How are there any of these still around?

 

[Houston Rockets]

I still have mine, I got mine like in 91 and it is still running strong today.. I have re did it a couple of times and paint it but it works good... Built very well..

 

[telstar_1]

Funny, tonight I flipped to an old episode of Strange Evidence and saw an original 10-footer with the bare aluminum ribs (I always thought they looked better- cooler? than when they started painting them black along with all else) in footage from 1994.

Now I'm remembering that I had started making some mods to the polar axis pivot bolts because some were loosening in use. It had like 2 separate bolts top & bottom instead of a single long throughbolt. I think I was getting longer ones and double-nutting them. Did a lot of funky mechanical hacks back then. Also painted the black feed covers silver to reject heat, then later decided against feed covers altogether, just seal coax at the LNB.

 

[(((Garyd)))]

I sold about 400 of them