Hacking A Marine Radio Dish

Having watched some enjoyable movies on repurposed satellite tv for pc dishes on YouTube, [Melan] wished to get in on the motion. She managed to supply herself an Intellian i4, a dish constructed for marine use, and set about hacking it to do her bidding.

[Melan] first set about convincing the antenna that it was nonetheless on a ship through the use of an RP2040 microcontroller and an RS-422 module to ship NMEA sentences. This was essential to inform the i4 the “heading” of the “boat”, although [Melan] was actually utilizing the rig on land. From there, she was in a position to get the Intellian software program to run the antenna simply by emailing the corporate.

However, she wished to see if it might be managed with out it. She started by sniffing communications between the software program and the Antenna Control Unit, and decompiling the code. It was comparatively simple to place collectively a protocol description and determine command the antenna the place to level just by issuing instructions for azimuth and elevation.

We’ve featured different nice bits of satellite tv for pc tools earlier than, like this truck tracker teardown from a few years ago. If you’ve acquired some good tools on the bench that listens in on (or transmits out to) birds in house, don’t hesitate to tell us on the tipsline.