Penton Systems / Tools / Dish pointing
Free tool · satellitePoint the dish
Azimuth, elevation and range to any geostationary satellite from any spot on Earth, the whole belt drawn over your sky, and the minimum round trip physics allows. It runs entirely in your browser.
Calculator
This calculator needs JavaScript. The geometry is described below.
From geometry to a working link
- 01
True versus magnetic
Azimuth here is relative to true north. A compass points to magnetic north, which differs by your local magnetic declination, several degrees in many places. Correct for it before aiming by compass.
- 02
Elevation matters
Below about 10 degrees, trees, buildings and terrain often block the path and rain fade worsens. On a vessel or aircraft the pointing changes constantly; those need tracking antennas.
- 03
Latency is physics
A request and its reply cross the 35,786 km gap four times. That floor, roughly half a second, comes before any processing or terrestrial routing.
- 04
Not for low orbit
Starlink and Iridium satellites are not geostationary and need no fixed pointing in the same way. Penton Earth shows where low-orbit satellites are right now.
Planning a site, vessel or aircraft link?
We design the whole system: antenna, network, power, monitoring and failover across independent paths.