In the world of radio, the NOAA POES are considered a great stepping stone into the world of radio and antennas; however, there are so many directions to go from there. One day, while browsing YouTube, I came across this video by the Thought Emporium, in which they set up a wifi parabolic dish and modified it to be able to listen to the NOAA GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites), which are like the older brother to the NOAA POES. Instead of being in low Earth orbit and sending down a continuous scan of Earth, they orbit far enough from Earth to be considered geostationary, where the satellite's period matches Earth's, so it appears to remain in the same spot when viewed from Earth. The benefit is that it allows the satellite to constantly view the same section of the Earth, making it easy to observe an area over a period of time. Compared to NOAA POES, which sends down a continuous scan of Earth, NOAA GOES takes pictures of Earth at different wavelengths at regular intervals.

In the video, they bought a premade parabolic dish and modified it to be able to receive; however, I thought it would be cool to build my own satellite dish. Thus started my journey of research to find all the schematics I needed in order to build my very own satellite dish. Over a period of at least a month, I found schematics to build the parabolic dish and a calibrated antenna by Japanese and Russian radio enthusiasts, respectively. Takeyasu Schematics

Now, one might be concerned that since both of these schematics are older than me, they might not work for what I'm trying to do. However, physics doesn't change, and the series of satellites I’m going to listen to are from the 1970s, so that's not much of a concern.

Now, with my schematics, I just have to acquire the raw materials needed to construct the parabola and the patch antenna. While my local hardware stores didn't have the aluminum bar that I needed, the internet had me covered. After acquiring the bars, I had to cut them to size with a Dremel and drill screw holes to connect the bars. Now, with all the bars connected, I had a real parabola!

To make it actually reflect any radio signal, I had to sew on a metal mesh onto the bars to give it a backing. While cutting and sewing were quite mentally and physically painful, I eventually had a working parabolic reflector. Now I needed to build the antenna; however, being the cheap person that I am, I didn’t want to actually spend money on the proper parts. I started out by using foam covered in aluminum foil as the backplate, later switching to a thinner 3D printed backplate for my antenna. Instead of buying a proper SMA plate connector, I soldered a coax cable directly to the antenna.

Unsurprisingly, this makeshift antenna failed and only caused more problems as time went on. Biting the bullet, I bought the proper parts and ended up with a beautiful, proper patch antenna.

Measuring this with Spektrum analysis software, it was right on my target: 1.7 GHz. Now, with a properly built parabolic reflector and patch antenna, connecting them gave me a satellite dish that, in theory, could receive signals from the GOES series satellites. Now, while it theoretically could receive the satellite's signal, it took me a while to actually successfully record the signal. It turns out that while trying to receive the signal, I had my SDR (software-defined radio) directly connected to the antenna, right in the way of the parabolic reflector. My cheapness had come back to bite me as my refusal to buy coax cable let the noise from the USB device completely destroy the signal I was actually trying to listen to. After acquiring the correct cable, I was finally able to hear the beautiful noise of the GOES satellite sending data down to earth. Below is a GIF (for sure pronounced yiff) that I compiled from an entire day's worth of pictures from the GOES-16 satellite.

After a long time of researching, building, and troubleshooting, I finally had a working satellite dish that I could get real time pictures of the Earth directly from space.