The Antenna That Wouldn't Stop Growing
Prologue: Open the window and look at the sky 🌌 Right now, while you read this, multi-million euros satellites are passing over your head. Some of them are transmitting pictures of the Earth to anyone who cares to listen. Not to their partner companies. Not to governments. To anyone . The images go out unencrypted, raining down over whole continents on frequencies you can pull in with about 100 euros of hardware and a balcony facing the sky. That is true for Earth pictures, for weather data, aviation/maritime tracking, amateur radio, even videos from the International Space Station 🛰️! I didn't know that either... until I did! And when I did, I felt a new frontier opening up, like I could reach the stars for real, from my home. New space adventures and discoveries were expecting me, one satellite at a time. This is a story about reaching (weather imagery) satellites. It's also a story of how a "let me just try one thing" turned into a distributed ground station running across two countries, a dead laptop resurrected as a server, my dad on a ladder in Théding while I watch from Barcelona and, as I write this, a geostationary satellite drifting slowly across the sky toward the one spot that would let me receive it. The project isn't finished. I mean that literally: this article ends on a spacecraft that is still in motion. But I should introduce the cast first, because the difference between two kinds of satellite is the key to this whole project. Weather satellites come in two families. The first are polar orbiters 🛰️. They fly low, a few hundred kilometers up, and fast, looping North to South while the Earth turns underneath them, so they eventually pass over everywhere (over your home too! 👾). They're the ones I chase in this story: the Russian METEOR-M series, 800 km over our heads, broadcasting down in the VHF band around 137 MHz . The catch is they're only up there for about ten to fifteen minutes at a time. The satellite climbs out of the horizon, arcs over us,