Nooelec GOES Weather Satellite Mesh Antenna - 21dBi Parabolic Antenna w/ 1.7GHz Center Frequency, 200MHz+ Bandwidth, LMR400 Feed Cable with Male SMA Connector, Mounting Hardware, & 2 Year Warranty

While it's only a dipole, which means you take a 3dB (half power) hit on a RHCP signal, it still works phenomenally well for GOES. Mine is on a AZ/EL tracking system, so I t also works phenomenally on HRT signals from NOAA and meteor. You HAVE to use the SAWBIRD filter with this antenna for GOES, and it HAS TO be right at the antenna - not 10' away. other than that, works great, and the price point was decent too.

I appreciate that Nooelec provides detailed spec sheets and instructions through their own website. Setting up this antenna was straightforward and it worked well with a GOES-18 receiver chain

Slightly difficult to get all the bolts, washers, and nuts to fit. I had to leave some washers out so it worked. Once assembled and aimed however, it works great.

I don’t blame the brand. This type of antenna is not great. I knew this already from all the other ones I’ve owned. I was hoping Nooelec. had something different, but they don’t. Wobbly, not accurate, poorly designed and finicky aiming adjustments. A good dish for this frequency range is much more expensive.

With this antenna, combined with the Nooelec SAWbird for GOES signals, I can achieve a Viterbi correction rate of around 70 per packet from GOES-16. Of course, signal quality will vary from location to location, but I am *extremely* pleased with this antenna.I had previously been struggling with a different 19dBi, 1.9GHz center frequency mesh antenna I had bought three years previously. It used to average around 350 Vit. in my location, but a month ago something broke and I could no longer get any error rate below 650, and I was dropping about half of all incoming packets. I was worried about buying this new antenna: worried that either my problem was not the antenna at all, and worried that this new antenna would not perform any better than my old one.I'm happy to say my worries were unfounded. Even just holding this new antenna by hand, without stable mounting, I was able to get a better error rate than I had ever seen on my old mismatched antenna. It turns out antenna tuning matters! Who knew. My downlink is rock-solid again, and I'm back to accumulating images.

Bottom of the barrel in terms of product quality, but for the price that is not too surprising. Be cautioned that it is literally rough around the edges - the cast aluminum was not smoothed out prior to powder coating - and could cut you. The reflector near the receiver came with the blue protective film still on it, also with sharp rough edges from machining. While the above is excusable for a low-cost part, I received a package without screws for assembly, so two stars is the best I can do.

I first built the antenna on a ball-head tripod to get the azimuth, elevation, skew and electronics to work. I am using Smartee SDR and SAWbird+GOES with the parabolic antenna attached directly (inside PVC tube attached to mast) and connected to my rPI4 with an 15' USB 3 cable . I routinely get vit of <350 with zero drops. I have used this setup for GOES-17 also but with our trees, I am using the antenna primarily for GOES-16. Be patient with the alignment, it is somewhat forgiving but must be close.

This Dish/antenna is a sweet addition to my Weather imagery decoding projects also added to my Cyberdeck gobox it serves as both receiver and booster to a wifi hotspot i take camping