The project is designed to develop a dish antenna positioning system that can be operated by using a conventional TV remote. In order to position the dish antenna to an exact angle such that it receives maximum signal of a particular frequency from the satellites and other broadcasting sources, the antenna needs to be adjusted manually at the antenna fixture.
In order to overcome the difficulty of adjusting it manually there, this proposed system is developed to adjust the position of the dish remotely by a simple TV Remote. This system consists of two motors that enable dish antenna to move in both horizontal and vertical directions. The TV remote acts as a transmitter whose data is received by an IR receiver which is interfaced to a microcontroller of the 8051 family.
The TV remote sends coded data to the receiver whose output is then sent to the microcontroller. Microcontroller sends control signals to the motors through an interface IC also known as motor-driver IC.
The code followed by the TV remote is a standard RC5 code. This code is used in the program to recognize the input code from the TV remote for the controller to develop appropriate output signal for the motor-driver IC.
Furthermore, this project can be enhanced by using RF control instead of IR which has got the line of sight communication restrictions.