Official News - page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: HOW TO BUILD A VERY CHEAP SATELLITE DISH

by Hazed

When you were a kid, did you ever try to make a telephone out of two cans and a piece of string? It works, after a fashion, but not very well.

Here's another example of a home-made solution replacing an expensive gadget - but this time it seems to have worked just fine. A software programmer in New Zealand substituted a $10 Chinese cooking wok for a $20,000 satellite dish, and saved a great deal of money.

Ken Jones is the ingenious chap. He volunteered to help TV station 45 South, who needed to transmit its signal from its studios to a location 12.5 miles away. The cost of a commercial satellite dish capable of doing the job was $20,000, but Jones came up with a much cheaper alternative.

Together with a friend, Murray Bobbette, he did mathematical calculations and proved that "the curved metal face of a wok would have the same effect as a small satellite dish," according to a report in the New Zealand Herald. Jones said, "The $20,000 for a commercial link was just money we didn't have, so we bought several woks. We have spent a lot of time getting it right - the first time we installed one we had it up a pole with the handle still on the end of the wok."

This reminds us of the early days of wifi, when geeks discovered a great antenna to pick up wireless signals could be made out of an empty Pringles tube.

Engineering bodges win again!

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