When you say "hand track", you're not kidding.
I was expecting something with motors controlled by a person, but this is literally picking up the dish and pointing it by muscle power.
Back of envelope, a 1 meter parabolic antenna at 1.7 GHz gives about 12 degree beam width (FWHM), which is what makes this practical. Very clever.
Neat project! I've always wanted to try downlinking data from satellites because it just seems like magic. I wonder what sort of reactions you'd get from setting this up in a backpack/cyberdeck and walking around pointing a satellite dish at the sky.