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!). Saveitforparts t-shirts and other merch at https://saveitforparts.myspreadshop.com/ Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNLRcEn78Vc62C3GkMvBgtA/join Or support me via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/saveitforparts Check out gadgets and devices I like at https://www.amazon.com/shop/saveitforparts