from Hacker News

Show HN: EZ-TRAK Satellite Hand Tracking Suite

by benbojangles on 5/4/25, 4:10 PM with 13 comments

EZ-TRAK is a comprehensive satellite tracking suite designed for amateur radio operators, weather satellite enthusiasts, and educational purposes. The software interfaces with an EZ-TRAK BLE device which is mounted to a lightweight foldable portable satellite dish antenna to hand track satellites in real-time, providing azimuth and elevation data for optimal antenna positioning.

  • by ooterness on 5/4/25, 5:05 PM

    When you say "hand track", you're not kidding.

    I was expecting something with motors controlled by a person, but this is literally picking up the dish and pointing it by muscle power.

    Back of envelope, a 1 meter parabolic antenna at 1.7 GHz gives about 12 degree beam width (FWHM), which is what makes this practical. Very clever.

  • by Liftyee on 5/4/25, 6:41 PM

    Neat project! I've always wanted to try downlinking data from satellites because it just seems like magic. I wonder what sort of reactions you'd get from setting this up in a backpack/cyberdeck and walking around pointing a satellite dish at the sky.

  • by wkat4242 on 5/4/25, 6:34 PM

    Really cool project! What kind of foldable dish do you use?

  • by lotyrin on 5/5/25, 1:09 AM

    I guess I'm just too far down the motion-capture rabbit hole, but I first interpreted this phrase as "tracking hands by satellite" rather than "tracking satellites by hand". I think purely linguistically (without any context that it's going to be easier for a hand to track a satellite than a satellite to track a hand) it's likely to be interpreted that way, also.

  • by hiatus on 5/5/25, 12:50 AM

    Am I missing something or is this repo devoid of the code mentioned in the README?