Merely reporting the weather in my area.....

[TronxII]

4 hours ago, simon43 said:

I just bought a 7 foot diameter satellite dish to receive the weather images from a geostationary satellite (GK-2A), which produce the 'whole Earth' view (well, one side of the Earth) as shown in one of my previous posts. 

 

 

Before this dish, what antenna and software did you use for the previous pictures?  I played around with this stuff some months ago, IIRC the frequency was around 160MHz ? , made only a simple dipole  but could not get any good reception with the SDR. 

[SkyNets]

Using Satdump at the moment on a SDR dongle, had some cool images but mostly random ocean.

[simon43]

15 hours ago, TronxII said:

Before this dish, what antenna and software did you use for the previous pictures?  I played around with this stuff some months ago, IIRC the frequency was around 160MHz ? , made only a simple dipole  but could not get any good reception with the SDR. 

OK, there are 2 different systems:

 

1 - Low earth orbit (LEO) weather satellites at about 450km above the Earth, such as NOAA 15, 18 and 19, and the Russian birds Meteor 2-3 and 2-4.  They transmit around 137 MHz. These are the images that I've been posting (except for that single whole-world image).

 

Since they are close to the Earth, these satellites move faster than the Earth is spinning, meaning that they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes.  In other words, you will only receive an image when the bird is passing over you, and at other times no image is possible since the bird is somewhere else over the Earth.

 

Luckily, NOAA-15 passed over my location just 15 minutes ago, and here's one of the images received, with the intensity of the rain shown in colours:

 

 

I use an SDR to receive the satellite signal and Satdump free software to decode the satellite signal.

 

2 - Geostationary weather satellites are about 50,000 km away from the Earth, in an orbit which means they move at the same speed as the Earth turns, meaning that they are visible all the time and always show the same area of the Earth. To decode these images, you can use Satdump again, but you need to use a dish antenna and feed horn to actually receive a strong enough signal.  So that's the fun challenge for me 🙂

 

If you want to receive weather satellite images, using an SDR dongle and Satdump is fine.  The easiest and strongest signals come from NOAA 18 and 19, but you do need to mount your receiving antenna clear of buildings/trees etc - my antenna is on a 6-metre pole.  A simple dipole antenna should receive some signal, but a 'QFH' antenna works much better - see my photo of this kind of antenna that I built in a few hours from some wire and water pipe.