Fun and related project. The GOES satellites broadcast a signal at around 1.6GHZ that you can pick up and decode, giving you live images (albeit slightly less resolution than the pro-level GRB broadcast), without using the Internet!

It's a great beginner hobby project requiring ~100-200 dollars of hardware. There's also a large community of enthusiasts and it also opens up a gateway into RF hobby, other RTL-SDR things, ham radio, and other fun engineering time sinks that really helped pass the time during the Pandemic years.

I wrote a small writeup on how to get started a while ago: https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2