Receiving Weather Satellite Images

Sean VK7FAZE has recently been experimenting with NOAA APT weather Satellite reception and shares his experiences with us in this article

False-colour image taken from NOAA-18 showing east coast of Australia

False-colour image taken from NOAA-18 showing east coast of Australia

There is not much more fascinating than getting pictures from space.  And with a but of smarts and some cheap bits and pieces it’s possible to do this quite easily.

One of the display pieces at REAST’s stand at this years Festival of Bright Ideas was a display showing how to receive weather satellite photos using some fairly easily obtainable bits and pieces – a computer with a ‘USB TV Dongle’ as the now classic Software Defined Radio, a simple but impressive looking Quadrafilar Helical Antenna, and software freely downloadable from the Internet.

The antenna is built out of PVC electrical conduit and a few fittings, some 75mm PVC storm drain, and some old co-ax cable left over from an old TV installation.  Some cutting and drilling, PVC glue and a couple of lazy hours on a Saturday afternoon and its done.

The software was a current version of Ubuntu Linux and the latest copy of GQRX fresh from the authors repository, with a little gentle post-processing using WxToImg to produce the ‘false colour’ images.  I used the ‘gpredict’ program to track and display the various satellites passing overhead and on the day it went down quite well.

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Saturday Member Day 8/10

SDR PresentationWe had another fantastic Saturday member day up at the clubrooms!

Martin VK7MA was quick to show off his CW skills that he has been working on along with his Morse key using the club radio and was quick to make a QSO. In a hobby that is seeing so much progress being made in new digital modes such as FreeDV and WSJT, seeing people learning one of the first forms of radio communication is fantastic!

Ben VK7BEN brought up his home radio, a Yaesu FTDX-1200 which has recently had an FFT-1 board installed in it, with the promise of it being able to decode CW, PSK and RTTY on the radio, along with waterfall display.

Definitely the highlight of the day was Scott VK7LXX giving a practice run to attendees of his upcoming Ruxcon security conference presentation on using the popular RTL-2832 based TV tuners for computers as software defined radios and how they could be used for decoding LIPD signals, pager messages and many other signals heard in the spectrum! Thanks Scott!

We’ll be opening the clubrooms again on 29th October from 11am. This is around the same time at the CQWW SSB Contest starts, so we might try and operate the club station VK7OTC for part of the contest!

See you there!