Said from experience of having built something more complicated and having it perform worse than two pieces of copper tubing stuck in a piece of scrap plastic.
I've been dabbling with RF, but I don't quite understanding the appeal of downloading NOAA sat images. It is simply 'hello world' for receiving sat downlinks?
For me it's a "hello world" for experimenting with building VHF antennas. It's nice, because they are on a schedule that you can plan around and more interesting than listening to the local dispatch systems.