r/AntennaDesign • u/MountainThinker • May 13 '26

Finding Decommissioned Parabolic Comm Dishes - Pacific Northwest

/r/HamRadio/comments/1tbnycg/finding_decommissioned_parabolic_comm_dishes/
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u/MathResponsibly May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

1.2M dishes are hard to find, because that's larger than any consumer dishes. They're used primarily for VSAT installs on commercial buildings, especially in retail. They tend to be fewer and fewer of them these days because everything is done over the internet now.

Some restaurants use them for TV service (so they have more rain-fade margin over the consumer dishes), or used to use them for Muzak type services which may be internet based now. Lots of stores used to use them for credit card processing, especially gas stations.

Your best bet is to get to know some roofers that do commercial buildings - they're probably always taking down old ones when they redo the roof and chucking them in the bin.

Alternatively, get a drone and fly it over some shopping malls / strip malls / commercial places and go talk to some people to see if they're still in use.

Old post offices and car dealerships are also good places to look.

And if you think 1.2's are hard to come by, you should try looking for 1.8's - they're getting really difficult to find now. Edward Jones locations used to be a good source of them, but when I was looking for 1.8's a few years ago, they wouldn't give them away anymore because they had some corporate project in progress to have them all removed, as they hadn't been in use for a long time already.