GOES Weather Satellite RTL-SDR Bundle - Includes NESDR SMArTee XTR Software Defined Radio, & Everything Else Needed to Receive LRIT, HRIT & HRPT Satellite Weather Images Directly from Space!

I bought this kit with the intention of receiving signals sent by the GEO-KOMPSAT-2A satellite. It works great with no problems, I am able to receive transmissions at a solid 17 SNR. However, adjusting the setup is where I ran into issues. Elevation and azimuth adjustments were no problem, just loosen the bolts a little, and you’re good to go. But the skew adjustment was an absolute pain. Adjusting the skew requires you to remove the entire antenna from its mount, as shown in the photos. When you remove these bolts, not only does the dish come off, but the boom detaches from the dish as well. This means that when adjusting the skew, you have to keep the boom upright while simultaneously holding the dish in place, almost impossible if you can’t put your hand in front of it without losing the signal. The fact that I was installing this on a slanted roof in 34°C heat might have added to the frustration, but nevertheless, the skew adjustment should not be this difficult to rotate.

This is a quality kit! The antenna is very easy to assemble and setup. Connecting the antenna to the preamp - that to the provided cable and the cable to the receiver is again easy. I mounted the antenna on an old piece of pipe for testing, temporarily mounting the pipe to an available awning support and got busy downloading a free copy of SatDump (in my case - for Windows). From there it was just a matter of paying attention (RTFM) to verify drivers were correctly installed and that the software was configured correctly. A little looking up of my exact location and that of both GOES-East (now GOES-19) and GOES-West (Now GOES-18) satellites allowed the correct azimuth and elevation angles to be applied. I was amazed that signals were immediately present and began generating images! I haven’t yet applied the correct skew angle to the antenna, but still get very adequate S/N reception. In summary - this is a quality kit and a bargain at that!

Very easy to assemble and set up-- pretty much the same as a tv satellite dish. Fortunately, my Longitude is close enough to that of the Satellite, that skew and polarisation wasn't important. Just had to point the dish south and match the elevation to my latitude. Works just fine, and now that I have a permanent mount and my VIT sits around 60-100 all day, except when the sun passes behind the dish and satellite, which is to be expected. It even survived 160kph sustained winds,, from the south, right on the face of the dish. VERY impressed with that

TL;DR: Equipment is good. Simple to setup. If you use a RPi3 don't expect to run much else as it'll throttle (I've tried different RPi3's, occurs on all) due to power draw. Pi build time: About an hour. Mainly downloading libaries/compiler/compiling goestools. Guide link below. Kit build time: 20 minutes. I build the Raspberry Pi 3 the night before I received the kit. I followed this guide for the most part: https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2#file-goes16-rtlsdr-md The kit itself is pretty simple. It comes in pieces which overlap and bolt together. I had to look at pictures here to make sure I was doing it right as I didn't have any directions. I get it, only 8 bolt/nuts, but I didn't want to mess it up. The coax cable is.. impressive. Incredibly thick, reminds me of pulling fiber. Holds it's shape for sure as getting the bend out of it was a task. It makes the little SMA connectors look tiny. Be prepared to have to drill some large holes if you plan to route it into a house. I trust it much more than cheap, thin cables found on Amazon. I tried it and some cheap coax and didn't see really any difference.. but I feel like it'll weather better outside. The GOES+ saw filter is not waterproof and I wish it was. I've managed seal it inside a container and wrapped that container with reflective tape in an attempt to reduce solar heat (Florida.) This is my second filter from NooElec and I believe it's working fine. I'm getting 80-90 VIT on this setup. The SDR works as described. Be cautious when planning where you will install it. Without a cool location/active cooling the SDR will likely overheat. Just playing with it outside, using my shed to shelter it from the sun, my VIT went from 90 to 400 over 10 minutes. Moving it back indoors resolved this issue. Ultimately this is a step forward on my goal to build a proper weather monitoring setup. I'm currently monitoring weather balloon launches and now downloading weather satellite data without an Internet connection. Starlink aside as a future Internet service, I live in a location where weather and hurricanes are a concern. Loss of connectivity is an absolute possibility and having the ability to gather weather data offline is a pretty cool idea.

Because of the way I wanted to set things up this required climbing a learning curve for me (eg re-learning Linux because I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi.) like many projects that require a lot of open-source software, getting going required a lot of googling. YMMV, if you’re able to just hook it up to a Windows machine or a Mac. The documents are a little scant, but adequate. I had a glitch with the receiver, but Kayla in customer support was excellent, and got it sorted out with me via email. I am going to have fun with this. Highly recommended.