GOES Satellite Reciever
Throughout my undergrad, my whole class would spend hours and hours comparing the geologic maps we made in the field to professionally generated maps or even to satellite imagery. This was a wonderful learning tool that showed me how available satellite data can be. There are existing platforms that show you the most recent publicly available satellite data which made me wonder, 'are they getting it from an online database or are they grabbing it themselves?' The most common answer is, of course, they are querying a [NOAA](https://www.noaa.gov/) database and displaying the info for you to consume. NOAA partnered with AWS to have the data available through AWS, [this is a guide](https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-goes/) on how to access the data through AWS directly. I thought it would be a really fun project to go one step further and collect the satellite data first hand. While researching this more, I found someone who had done a similar project on youtube, [The Thought Emporium](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjClTnZ4Xh4). It's a 14:23 minute video and worth the watch. My project would be very similar to his design but with a couple alterations. First thing to know about the NOAA satellites is that they are in geostationary orbit. This means that they are always in the same place in the sky no matter the time of day. This is a massive reduction in complexity for the project because once I find the location in the sky, I wont need to move the receiver. Deciding on what satellite to seek was also exceptionally easy, [GOES-17](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-17) is NOAA's west coast regional satellite. So from here all I need to do is point a dish at the sky and collect that data! ---  *An example of the data that is transmitted from GOES-17*. Well, not quite. The data from GOES-17 is being broadcast in a format that most normal satellite dishes are not capable of receiving. The standard antenna design is called *right-hand circularly polarized* (RHCP).  *The above diagram gives a quick design for an RHCP antenna and its configuration.* I have built the skeleton of the test double cross antenna and now just need to fabricate the dipoles. The next step in the chain is a filter, this [Nooelec SAWBIRD+ GOES Barebones Filter](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GBFNV1H) is designed for the specific frequency I am trying to work in. This saw filter will help to refine any signal coming from the particular frequencies we are looking for while eliminating noise from outside bands. Downstream of the filter will be the software defined radio (SDR). For my first SDR I bought the [RTL-SDR Blog V3](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B011HVUEME) which is a highly rated hobbyist SDR. It comes with small antennas that can be used to pick up radio signals out of the box. Within 5 minutes of downloading the SDR software I was able to have local radio playing through my receiver. Once I am able to verify my set up, I will look to put all my devices in a weather tight container and run a [Raspberry Pi Zero](https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/) running as a web server to deliver the data to my NAS. I'm not 100% sure what I want to do with the data yet, but so far it has been a great technical challenge.