Oh, the quad. I was heavily into receiving the NOAA satellites lower resolution images. Never got into the HRPT with the costs and real necessity of having a tracking system, although I really wanted one bad.
The quad would have been a bit beyond my ability to make, but a guy in Chicago, only a part day's drive away, was making them out of good copper tubing. With good low loss RG-8 and a stable preamp, I had AOS withing 7 degrees elevation, and sometimes 5 or so, but hard to know for sure with the bigger hills all around at different azimuth. This thing never had any drop outs or fades, ever. If there wasn't a storm in the area, all the receptions were rock solid from AOS to LOS, and it was really fun to come home from work and go to the computer to check what had been received that day. I had to select which satellite was going to be the best for my interests, and with a single frequency non-computer controlled frequency selection, tuned it to the one I wanted and it woke things up when AOS began and recorded to LOS, so the non-dropout status was helpful.
I've not fired up the old DartCom receiver (from England if I recall) with the necessary bandwidth in the front end to pass the entire downlink plus doppler, and went into a board that was custom made by a couple guys down in Titusville, FL that sold them to enthusiasts like me, and wrote much of our own software to play with it.
Now I think that other receivers are much more available, Quorum and a Special Interest Group had a project for awhile, but I think that has all faded away. Now a signal on the audio input can be grabbed and with all the neat stuff for the other frequency monitors, there may be even a way for those newfangled SDR sticks to work, but don't know if they are mainly FM or not.
I may have to dust things off again just to hear that click-clock-click-clock of the signal and watch the line by line picture accumulate. I know that McIdas from the UW, Madison Space Science and Engineering has some mighty fine tracking antennas and also get feeds from other centers to make the HRPT stuff available on line, but ever since my old Wx Professor Vernor Soumi let me watch him and a couple engineers get a signal from his experiment on a Tiros or some such, I've been interesting in this.
Anyway, if you can build a quad or find someone with one for that band for sale without too much of a hit and you are still doing this hobby, it is a whole different world than the crossed dipoles and a lot simpler and no fussy compared to the Yaesu tracking rotors.
Long answer, but maybe it will spur some discussion about satellite picture reception and can move over to that thread.
Dale
