Hi, I hope this post/question is okay - I’m doing some art that includes various radio antennas and I’d really like to run them past someone who knows more than I do to make sure they look okay.
I’m working on location art for a solarpunk TTRPG campaign and am doing a scene for a somewhat old fashioned (in this setting), heavily automated farm. The guy who lives here does a lot of the work maintaining a meshnet in the mostly-abandoned town where the campaign takes place. I figure he’s also sort of generally a tinkerer and has probably amassed a decent assortment of old tech.
The last time I was working on a scene with antennas I asked the folks over on r/hamradio for advice and they were super helpful so I reused a lot of the antennas from before, and tried to scale them to match that scene and to photographs I’ve seen, but I’m definitely not knowledgeable on this stuff and am happy to make changes to get it right.
As before, I really just want to make sure it doesn’t look offensively dumb to folks in the ham radio scene, and if you have any recommendations for antennas you’d like to see or that would say something interesting, I’d be happy to include them. Thanks for any advice you feel like giving!
Thank you so much! I can definitely add the cantenna dish - should it be pointed in any particular direction?
Whatever you’re trying to look at, terrestrial to terrestrial link or for satcom (or drone tracking antennas!) is common. The dishes with an offset feed like I liked to have the main beam pointed up relative to the perpendicular of the dish. So you may see it tilted up but not straight into the sky. This is a common arrangement for things like satellite tv service which are quite common and often repurposed for ham and other uses. You’ll also see a cantenna feed on center fed dishes, think like a big deep space dish or a radio telescope type. Those do point perpendicular to the dish.
Thanks! How’s this look? I added one to the barn and one to the house, pointed in different directions.