Gabe Emerson Upcycles an Old TV Dish, Cardboard, and Foil Into a GOES Ground Station
Rather than turn to a commercial dish Emerson took an old DirecTV dish, some aluminum foil, and cardboard to pick up weather satellite data.
Gabe Emerson has turned a salvaged satellite TV dish into a receiver for GOES weather satellite data via a software-defined radio — using nothing more than upcycled cardboard and foil tape.
First launched in 1975 and currently sitting at a constellation of four operational, 13 retired, and one failed satellite, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) mission operated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a frequent target for radio amateurs. When correctly received, the satellites provide terrestrial and weather imagery - and if you don't have a suitable satellite dish to hook up to your DIY ground station, you can make one.
"I wanted to download images from the GOES-16 weather satellite, but didn't have a big enough satellite dish," Gabe Emerson, of the saveitforparts YouTube channel, explains. "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!"
Emerson's complete ground station includes a commodity laptop, the upcycled dish mounted to a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) system from an old security camera, a SAWbird low-noise amplifier (LNA), and a low-cost receive-only RTL-SDR software-defined radio capable of picking up a 1.700 MHz signal.
The full video is now available on the saveitforparts YouTube channel.
