Reusing Winegard Trav'ler

[mhhorowi]

Has anyone considered or completed a retrofit of a traveler external mounting system to use something such as a directional antenna for cellular signal. We are no longer using our satellite system in the coach in favor of streaming and it got me thinking that it would be nice to reuse the equipment for another purpose. Of course, we could take it all off and sell it for pennies on the $ instead. Thoughts? Is there a way to manually control the system to rotate a device attached to the base to point in a desired direction.

[docj]

The Trav'ler is designed to receive signals in the GHz region of the spectrum, cell phones operate at much lower frequencies. To do as you suggest would require complete replacement of the receiving elements of the device (the LNBs) and even then there would be no way to manually move it around to search for the cellular signal.

I think there are much easier and more effective ways to get a directional antenna for capturing cellular signals.

[mhhorowi]

Originally Posted by docj

The Trav'ler is designed to receive signals in the GHz region of the spectrum, cell phones operate at much lower frequencies. To do as you suggest would require complete replacement of the receiving elements of the device (the LNBs) and even then there would be no way to manually move it around to search for the cellular signal.

I think there are much easier and more effective ways to get a directional antenna for capturing cellular signals.

I was just spitballing an idea. Moving on now

[SLOweather]

The traveler has a dome? Take it off, remove the dish and the tilting mechanism, and retrofit a cellular Yagi antenna on the turntable.


The pan motor is a stepper, so you will need some sort of driver to rotate it, maybe via an Arduino.


And the antenna and phone would really like 50 ohm coax, not the 75 ohm TV coax.

[mhhorowi]

Originally Posted by SLOweather

The traveler has a dome? Take it off, remove the dish and the tilting mechanism, and retrofit a cellular Yagi antenna on the turntable.


The pan motor is a stepper, so you will need some sort of driver to rotate it, maybe via an Arduino.


And the antenna and phone would really like 50 ohm coax, not the 75 ohm TV coax.

I might be better off taking the entire unit out, selling it for a reasonable cost and then buying a new motor and programming a control board to accomplish the same objective. It would be nice to have something that would raise and lower like the dish along with finding the cell tower all at the push of a button. That might even be marketable .