The recent 'recovery' of a formerly lost NASA satellite by a Canadian ham, amateur astronomer and satellite observer has focused attention on a little-known radio monitoring niche. It sounds like satellite monitoring (both via rf as well as optically) could be an interesting challenge.

Scott Tilley, VE7TIL, discovered that a NASA earth-monitoring satellite that had stopped transmitting more than a dozen years ago after suffering a power malfunction had come back to life. Evidently he accidentally picked up signals from the satellite while searching for other satellites, calculated orbital parameters from doppler shift measurements, and determined that the signals were from the missing satellite.

Some background info:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/12/what-one-amateur-observer-did-that-kicked-nasa-into-action-the-backstory-and-timeline/

http://www.arrl.org/news/canadian-radio-amateur-finds-resurrected-nasa-satellite

About the IMAGE satellite and its failure:

https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/i/image-mission

https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/publication/document/IMAGE_FRB_Final_Report.pdf

STRF satellite tracking toolkit:

https://github.com/cbassa/strf

About the satellite tracking hobby in general:

https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/frequently-asked-questions-about-satellite-tracking/

He doesnt seem fat enougj to call a ham... to me

"Missing". Suuuuuuuure. Can't think of a better way to hide a secret NSA satellite.

20 years ago I played with a lot of satellite work with my R7000. Today I'd use SDR.

Most of my targets were either TRANSIT satellites or FLTSATCOM (which required no tracking.)

FLTSATCOM was... "interesting." Some traffic went OTA unencrypted.

The other fun thing -- sadly no longer possible -- was listening to NAVSPASUR returns.

NAVSPASUR ran three massive multi-megawatt CW transmitters -- just a carrier -- at 216.98 MHz,
in a narrow fan beam over the country. When satellites hit the beam you'd get a huge spike in
signal strength and you could see the doppler and roughly work out altitude based on the
length of the return.

NAVSPASUR went offline just a few years ago. Interestingly not long before that a ham had
build a functioning bi-static radar intercept station and actually presented the how-to to the
government after the fact.

The concepts behind 'passive radar' are interesting for terrestrial uses as well, using rf broadcast sources such as TV and FM.

(I had not previously been familiar with the term 'bistatic radar' but it is easily understandable.)