In this study, adaptive control of a two-axis gimbal system with actuator dynamics in the presence of parametric uncertainties is addressed. The considered gimbal system is a pointing antenna which can rotate over y and z axes and covers all line of sights. Adaptive dynamic surface control technique is used to overcome the ‘explosion of complexity’ problem which appears in adaptive backstepping control design. By using the Lyapunov stability analysis, the convergence of the tracking error to origin and boundedness of all closed-loop signals are guaranteed. Finally, excellent performance of the proposed method for tracking the desired trajectories and also the effectiveness of this technique for controlling a two-axis pointing antenna are shown for a real antenna model in ADAMS.