Pictures of earth from space will never lose their luster for me. I wish money spent on missiles and bombs could be redirected for rockets to launch satellites for scientific purposes.
That's a really nice write up and the SDR looks quite nice for the price.
It brings back memories one of the things that made radio waves feel "real" to me was a similar setup where we raised and lowered the antenna parallel to the ground and saw the reflections strengthen the received signal or make it nearly vanish.
NOAA decommissioned it's last LRPT/APT capable satillites.
Russia has a couple open access 137MHz sats available Meteor M2-3 and M2-4 I believe they have become flakey with age, damage and other issues.
Those you could stand in your garden with a simple vdipole antenna and a cheap SDR to capture images.
https://gdamdam.github.io/meteor-satellite-reception/meteor-...
It brings back memories one of the things that made radio waves feel "real" to me was a similar setup where we raised and lowered the antenna parallel to the ground and saw the reflections strengthen the received signal or make it nearly vanish.