I just have a cheap little 5-ele portable LPDA and with that, my experience with aiming at geostationary satellites was - unlike a 10GHz sat TV dish - a matter of "general direction" as in "not North" and "just make sure it didn't fall off the tower".
Receiving those old MILSAT transponders is one of the many interesting things to do beyond 30MHz, but most of those are - to me - things I did once or twice just to see what it's all about. It's indeed often fascinating but not so much that it would warrant maintaining antennas for that. I did develop a somewhat sustained interest in the oldest (and for some reason most charming) zombie satellite ("Oscar-2" aka "Transit 5B-5") and a general interest in satellite reception but the MILSAT band was mostly just an interesting something to pick up from truly far away (36,000km vs. >400km LEO), with the pirates making sure there is actually something to hear on all those funny analog linear transponders they have put up for everyone to uncontrollably enjoy with quite manageable efforts. What the hell were they thinking would happen?
It was also fascinating to see how brutally this sorted out the hardware I used - no chance to see a trace of those transponders with an RTL stick from my high latitude and my kind of expensive Alinco DJ-X11 wasn't really any better than that, while the SDRPlay RSP made them faintly visible even on the least apt of my shortwave wire contraptions. For 1 point something GHz Intelsat reception I used an active Winradio LPDA and that needs a bit more attention at pointing it somewhere though. Similar story, it was entertaining to set everything up and successfully decode some commercial aviation ACARS data channels but in the long run that was only little more entertaining than the stock exchange ticker on a TV news channel for a poor man, again, to me (and I'm quite an aviation nut!). If you sum up the equipment list above, a poor man I became, but while not everything up there is a sustainable source of entertainment, the list of exiting things to try is long and like so many things in playing radio, the journey is the destination.
