Building a GOES-16 Antenna out of Trash, Cardboard and Foil Tape
Over on his YouTube channel saveitforparts has uploaded a video showing how he was able to modify and old DirectTV satellite dish found in the dumpster with cardboard and foil in order to receive images from the GOES-16 geostationary weather satellite.
I wanted to download images from the GOES-16 weather satellite, but didn't have a big enough satellite dish. So I made one out of an old TV dish, cardboard, and aluminum tape! Amazingly this actually works, and I was able to pull live pictures of the earth off the satellite in geostationary orbit! The cardboard won't last long-term, so I'm looking for an antique C-band dish that I can set up as a more permanent solution. However, for a cheap and expedient ground station, this worked pretty well!
Why not try a Free To Air Ku band dish? They are about 3 feet in diameter and much cheaper than a C band dish.
A guy in British Columbia uses an oil pair of rabbit ears for this
You have a URL for that so we can check it out?
The guy posts on the Facebook group, Amateur (ham) radio on a budget. Last name of Vogel. If you can’t find him with that information, I’ll try to put up a link to the group, but it’s one of those groups you have to join to access the content. It’s worth it though, as he posted at least 20 to 30 detailed posts on how he set things up and acquires images. I think he’s doing SSTV now