Satellite Ground Station With Trash, Cardboard, and Foil Tape!

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!
A step-by-step guide to receiving GOES satellites can be found here:
www.rtl-sdr.co...
More information here:
usradioguy.com/...
Both of these guides assume you'll be using a re-purposed Wifi Grid dish. You can get the entire "kit" of dish, SDR receiver, and LNA amp/filter here:
www.amazon.com...
You can piece this together with other parts and antennas, but you will at minimum need the SAWbird LNA and an SDR that can handle 1700mhz. The ability to power the filter via Bias-Tee from the SDR is optional, however the Sawbird will back-feed power if using a usb cable, so in that case you'll also want a DC filter.
If you don't want to buy the Wifi dish, any LARGE satellite dish should work with the cantenna design I used. Info on cantenna design here:
lucasteske.dev...
If all you have is a little modern TV dish like mine, I simply extended it in every direction with pieces of cardboard, then covered the cardboard with aluminum foil tape. This gave me kind of a marginal signal, more cardboard would probably help!
Some "gotchas" or problems I ran into:
-You can't run goestools on the latest Linux, it needs either Rasbian or something older than Ubuntu 19 due to a flaky version of opencv. (I think there are other scripts and apps that will work, or there is supposedly Windows software available).
-You have to be connected to a network for goesrecv / goesproc scripts to run, otherwise it can't find localhost (because... reasons?). I had to be within wifi range to get this to work, even setting a local static IP didn't help. There's probably another way around this if you want to run this setup off-grid or remote where theres' no network.
-I wasn't able to get below 500 vitterbi (vit) with my rig, but a level between 500-600 seemed OK-ish.
-If your dish is made of reflective foil and the sun lines up just right, you might cook your feedhorn / LNA!