Thanks guys for the welcomes, and thanks for all the pictures of your dishes too. Gives me inspiration on how to improve my own setup. Also makes me feel good to know I'm not the only "crazy" person out there with a yard full of parabolas.
I've been really lucky here; my job has allowed me to buddy up to a local radio station engineer and he's learned that I'll be glad to take all of his old "junk" off his hands. Most of these dishes came from him, the 6', the 10' and the 15'. Also a lot of ham radio toys; hardline, antennas, tower sections, connectors, mics, mic stands, equipment racks, old tubes, etc... wow, I never realized how much of a scavenger I am until I typed this all out.
Unfortunately the 10' is down now and was destroyed in the process of coming down. I wanted to make room for the 15' to go up. Once we got the 10 down, realized we couldn't hook up the 15 to the skid steer that was on hand that day. Right now I'm waiting for one of my neighbors to feel sorry for me and show up with a tractor or forklift or something to get it up in the air.
FatAir, I don't know what kind of dish the 10' was, but it was definitely an old commercial heavy duty thing. The part you can't see is all the detail with the huge thrust bearings and stuff. Also many customizations from over the years at the radio station before it was finally retired. They had it setup as a hand-crank polar mount, and I added the motor when I got it. Unfortunately the motor was setup so it would run right off the end to the east and the dish would fall and point at the eastern horizon. I had to keep track of it when turning it. I'm going to miss that dish :'( Many years of good FTA viewing from that thing.
To the forum. Got' to say:"Nice Dishes" there.
