When I was a kid (back in the 70s) we built hardware to do this - essentially it was: - an old TV pulled apart so the tube could be driver directly - horizonta

When I was a kid (back in the 70s) we built hardware to do this - essentially it was: - an old TV pulled apart so the tube could be driver directly - horizontal sync detector that reset the horizontal beam on the TV and advanced the vertical - an FSK->analog to drive the spot amplitude as it swept across the TV - a VHF receiver - someone with a homemade antenna pointing it at the sky, tracking manually by listening for the noise floor - a camera in a dark room and an operator who would open the aperture and start taking a photo when the pass started and closed it when the beam hot the bottom of the TV We did sat tracking on the local uni's mainframe so we knew where in the sky and when a pass would start. The satellites in those days made low passes and essentially took line by line of image as they moved thru their orbits. We could also get world wide images from a geostationary satellite that gave us 12 images made by stitching everything together (and whiting out all the communist countries). In those days a ground station cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were essentially (pre-commercial) faxes that printed on paper - our photos were higher quality