I am working on a 1.5-meter satellite dish with a custom receiver cantenna-like feed. The dish didn't come with feed arms, so I need a way to hold the feed into place. What I tried was using a 1-meter threaded rod. My threaded rod was 1m (length) x D=14mm (thickness). I used nuts to hold the feed in place and held the threaded rod from the little hole in the center of the dish (again, using nuts). This has the advantage of allowing me to adjust the position of the feed (focal length) so I can play around and experiment to see where my signal strength is at its peak.
Another advantage is that I don't need to use metallic arms (like many large dishes do) to keep it in place, as they can block a (small) portion of the radio waves from hitting the reflector and reduce its gain.
But there's a problem which leads me to come here and ask for help: even slightly touching the feed (or the edge of the rod) will have it wobble around for quite a while. This means that if there's a small wind, the feed will be wobbling around, which is not good.
My question is: what can I do about this? Can I use another type of rod, or make any adjustments to my current threaded rod in order to stop it from wobbling back and forth by the slightest touch? Could using a thicker threaded rod (the hole is 1 inch = 2.54 cm, but I could always drill a larger hole if needed), or would that not fix the problem?
A few pictures of the dish:
Any ideas are appreciated!