Discovery Drive is a low-cost, high-quality automatic satellite dish rotator designed for use with Discovery Dish and other antennas of similar size and weight, like Wi-Fi grid and Yagi antennas.

A motorized rotator allows you to use a satellite dish or directional antenna to track and receive signals from polar orbiting satellites, which quickly move across the sky. It also lets you switch swiftly between geostationary satellites without manually realigning the dish. And, it’s easy to set up, too—no messing about with expensive separate controllers! Just connect it to 12 V and USB serial (or Wi-Fi) and go!

Track the Sky, Map the Galaxy

A motorized rotator like Discovery Drive enables precise tracking of fast-moving polar orbiting satellites using a satellite dish or directional antenna. Examples of polar orbiting weather satellites you can track include NOAA POES, METEOR-M2, METOP, and FENGYUN. Depending on your location, you may also have access to other interesting satellites that dump data over specific regions. Amateur radio operators can also use Discovery Drive to track amateur radio satellites with Yagi antennas.

You can also use Discovery Drive with Discovery Dish’s Hydrogen Line feed to take hydrogen line readings across the galactic plane, creating a hydrogen map of the galaxy.

Features & Specifications

• Up to 125 kgcm (12.25 Nm) of torque
• ESP32 control board
• ± 1.5° of accuracy
• -360° to +360° Azimuth range, 0° - 90° elevation range
• 1.5 RPM Azimuth speed, 0.25 RPM elevation speed
• 12 V power input (either barrel jack or USB Type-C Power Delivery)
• Wi-Fi connectivity with browser-based web UI
• Serial over USB data connectivity or Wi-Fi data connectivity
• Low power draw (< 10 W, can be powered with PoE+ supplies and still have power left over for powering a single board computer and RTL-SDR)
• Robust worm gear-locked output drives
• Direct rotctl compatibility over Wi-Fi (compatible with programs that implement the rotctl protocol, such as SatDump, GPredict, and Look4Sat on Android)
• Hamlib compatibility (EasyComm II protocol)
• Waterproof outdoor enclosure

Open Source

All of Discovery Drive’s ESP32 firmware is open source and is already available on our GitHub page.

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