Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIA-x0QGBp0
Some people think space, and hence the existence of satellites, is fake.
The most obvious refutation of this is that you have to point your satellite dish exactly at the right satellite in the sky for it to work. There's no way of faking this. There's nothing else up there. But how to test this without throwing your dish out of alignment.
Here I hold up a metal object at 45° in front of the dish, the signal is lost, which shows the signal is coming from space.
The actual incoming angle is quite a bit steeper than it looks from the disk, as it uses an offset focus. This allows for easier mounting. Most dishes in the US are pointed at around 40-45°
With it being so steep it was a bit tricky to hold the metal tub in the right place. A more ambitious experiment might be to make a shield from a sheet of cardboard covered in aluminum foil and mounted on a pole.
To find out the angle and visualize all the geostationary statellites there's a variety of apps. One free one is "Satellite Pointer"
(Coordinates just set to Sacramento)
That looks like where the dish is pointing, 45° up. and 176° is nearly due south (180°).
You could do the rough math here. Assuming the satellite is one that's pretty much due south, all geostationary satellites are 22,300 miles above the equator. Sacramento is about 38.5° north, the radius of the Earth is about 3959 miles
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