Automated Weather Satellite Ground Station (Mostly Made From Trash)

I've just finished a major upgrade to my DIY satellite ground station. This involves a larger (7ft diameter) dish for geostationary GOES-East. I also moved my QFH antenna that receives Polar-Orbiting NOAA and Meteor satellites on VHF frequencies.

This project had some ups and downs, as do most of my builds! I'm using as much second-hand and free equipment as possible to keep costs low. The big dish was a former C-Band television antenna that I found on Craigslist, someone wanted it out of their yard. The L-band feed for GOES is an old coffee can or "cantenna", similar to what you'd use for long-range Wifi. The QFH antenna is one I built from plumbing parts a while ago, in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM99A1uUprQ

You can also see some of the other antennas in prior videos, such as my rectangular TV dish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JeGe2Gqswk and my folded-dipole UHF antenna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMOXBfkpRfk

Some of the software I'm using for this project includes:
- Goestools (https://github.com/pietern/goestools)
- Satdump (https://www.satdump.org/download/)
- SDR++ (https://www.sdrpp.org/)
- Raspberry-NOAA V2 (https://github.com/jekhokie/raspberry-noaa-v2)
- Vitality-GOES (https://github.com/JVital2013/vitality-goes)

I found Carl Reinemann's how-to guide for Goestools very helpful:
- https://usradioguy.com/programming-a-pi-for-goestools/

NOTES: I used a TV coax cable instead of a USB extension cable described in the above guide. I'm also not using syncthing as described in this guide, and I had to make one other change to the Autostart section. In rc.local I added "sleep 10" (without quotes) just above the two calls to goesrecv and goesproc.

Also thanks to @dereksgc and some of his associates for suggestions along the way!

Some of the hardware that I actually purchased includes:
- RTL-SDR (https://amzn.to/44GnpMY)
- SAWbird+NOAA (https://amzn.to/3wEmGiL)
- SAWbird+GOES (https://amzn.to/4agArSB)
- Raspberry Pi 4 B (https://amzn.to/4akSl6w) (You'll need two if doing both types of receiver!)
- External Bias Tee (https://amzn.to/44Garyy) (optional)
(Buying from these links give me a little cut without charging you more, they're a great way to help out my channel!).



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