hopefully saving some money on the QO-100 RX project

now in an earlier post I mentioned about my intent to attempt to receive QO-100 using off-the-shelf hardware for Sky UK's television service, I've not come across any cheap dishes anywhere however I could potentially construct the Bias-T out of parts I have lying around as all I need to do this is a ceramic capacitor to block DC but pass RF and an inductor to to pass DC and block RF, preferably inside a metal enclosure (I have an Altoids tin in mind for this), and what I intend to do is splice the existing Sky coaxial cable and hard wire this into the homebrew Bias-T with a BNC output for the receiver, the RTL-SDR.

The LNB can obviously be tested however it won't really receive anything because it is not fitted to a suitable dish, I just need to feed it with 12-volts, my bench supply can do 13.8v which should be fine for this task, if nothing goes bang it is good, otherwise it is scrap.

So all I will need now is a suitable satellite dish and away I go, however with an old Sky LNB I do not expect the best results, but we will see, this hobby is about experimenting after all.

73 de 2E0EIJ