Activity on the first geo-stationary Ham-Radio satellite is full swing now !!
It's nice to see how power levels of as low as a few 100 mW with a cheap consumer satellite dish are sufficient for a transmission distance of 36.000 km ...
Several homebrew hardware projects are now also showing up and one of them is "POTY" a Dualband feed one can mount on a consumer dish.
This feed combines a 2.4 GHz right-hand circular uplink with a 10 GHz Horizontal downlink.
This has a lot of advantages. Not only does one need only one dish for uplink and downlink,
especially once the dish is properly aligned for reception you also can be confident that when transmitting your pointing towards the correct satellite !!
-> -> -> This is good practice <- <- <-
It's in fact NOT a good idea to continuously transmit a signal into space and swing your transmit antenna in all directions until you see your signal re-appear on the Downlink !!
Who knows how many other satellites you have been hitting doing that... ?!?!?!
You can find the poty project here: http://www.hybridpretender.nl/