Now it’s trivial – a VHF scanner with one of the crystals replaced with a capacitor to increase the bandwidth, a homebrew antenna made out of coat hangers, and a computer with a sound card. As the satellite passed overhead it would plot dots on the scope, but it wasn’t until the pass was over and you developed the film (anybody remember B&W Polaroid film and the fixative sticks?) that you would see whether or not you had successfully gotten an image. A Polaroid camera was aimed at the scope and set for a long exposure image. An analog converter with a timing circuit changed the audio into X-Y coordinates and send them to a scope. In the earliest hobbiest versions surplus World War II VHF radios were modified to receive the 137 Mhz.
![wxtoimg poor quality image wxtoimg poor quality image](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bp4q8cPkkXs/maxresdefault.jpg)
They also offer various datastreams, high-res digital pics, retransmissions of HFFAX data, etc.Īctually this was first done in the 1960s (in an era of stone knives and bear skins). Of course, if somebody wants a challenge, the normal stuff from POES and GOES are just low-res analog pictures. Unfortunately, my construction skills are lacking, and I don’t feel like ponying up $$$ for the downconverter. My next project is going to be a GOES antenna and downconverter. One of these days, I’ll get around to reprogramming the setup to scan all 4 NOAA POES birds and Meteor 3-2-3. I get 5 passes a day, on average, from NOAA-19. Got a laptop hooked up to a handheld scanner with the discriminator filter bypassed (gets wider bandwidth on the final) and one of Dr. These days, I’m no longer a meteorologist, so I do this just for fun. My favorite catch was from McMurdo, of all places, but my most regular datastreams were from WLO and Offut. I picked up morse, FEC, and radiofax weather reports from all over the world. I remember having a DX440, simple dipole, and a simple converter to do HFFAX with. It was tough being a meteorology student and living in the middle of nowhere, having to come up with live data for doing homework on. I’ve been doing this since the early 90’s - a radio and cheap computer were a lot easier to come by than a decent rural Internet connection in those days. Posted in Radio Hacks Tagged noaa, satellite, software-defined radio, weather Post navigation We’re looking forward hearing about that.
![wxtoimg poor quality image wxtoimg poor quality image](https://storage.googleapis.com/wzukusers/user-26713971/images/5c8e542af122aNAei5YT/wxtoimg.jpg)
mentioned that he’s working on a post about the antenna he built for the project and has future plans for an automated system where he’ll have a webpage that always shows the most current image. Throw in a little post processing, Robert’s your mother’s brother, and you’ve got the image seen above. It just so happens there’s a program specifically for weather image decoding called WXtoImg, and another which runs under Linux called WXAPT. Once you do capture an audio sample, you’ll need something to turn it into an image.
#Wxtoimg poor quality image mac#
To record the incoming data a Mac program called DSP Radio was used. This makes us think back to the software-radio project that built using an FPGA–could that be adapted for this purpose? But we digress.
#Wxtoimg poor quality image software#
used a software defined radio receiver that he built from a kit. If you’ve got some homebrew hardware and post processing chops you can grab your own images from these weather satellites. Can you believe that pulled this satellite weather image down from one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather satellites using home equipment? It turns out that they’ve got three weather satellites in low earth orbit that pass overhead a few times a day.