I guess I'm just too far down the motion-capture rabbit hole, but I first interpreted this phrase as "tracking hands by satellite" rather than "tracking satellites by hand". I think purely linguistically (without any context that it's going to be easier for a hand to track a satellite than a satellite to track a hand) it's likely to be interpreted that way, also.
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.
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.