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Those pictures look... pretty rough. I know the author says you can clean them up in software but doesn't provide any pictures of the images they've received cl

Those pictures look... pretty rough. I know the author says you can clean them up in software but doesn't provide any pictures of the images they've received cleaned up in the software they've recommended. Is this actually worthwhile for anything other than just hacking for fun? Or is getting any useful data from this going to be a full-time job by itself?

brootstrap 7y ago
Personally i would say this is just a fun project and novelty factor of receiving a transmission from the satellite. If you actually want to get your hands on weather data and do useful stuff with it let NOAA do the heavy lifting. I can wager that most of us here probably dont want to write the code to seam together satellite images and clean them up. However i wont stop anyone, have at it friends.
xupybd 7y ago
To get better images you're going to need a better antenna. But if you have a use for the images is really up to you.
themodelplumber 7y ago
I appreciated these images during recent wildfires. They answered questions like, "is this smoke from something local or is it more likely from that fire that's 50 miles away," and you could also compare sets of imagery yourself which was kind of empowering.
exikyut 7y ago
Answering your question with a question... where do super-amazing-ultra-resolution satellite images come from, and can I download those using commodity/off-the-shelf equipment?
anilakar 7y ago
Lets put it this way: If you were doing this for something else than fun, you'd invest a bit more than ten bucks for a radio receiver USB dongle and some scrap metal wire.
blantonl 7y ago
If we ever got ourselves into a SHTF scenario (global thermonuclear war etc), the lack of local internet access could be a problem. The satellites you are receiving in this article are the NOAA-XX ones, which are completely self-contained and literally sweep the earth in Orbit broadcasting exactly what they see directly below them. This could function as a completely self contained weather forecasting tool only requiring solar power and no government based ground infrastructure to support. Current satellite pictures that you are used to seeing from the news and weather forecasting agencies use the GOES satellites, which actually rely on ground based infrastructure to process and then rebroadcast the products that are disseminated from them. (Think: downlink-process-uplink and then downlink to consumers). Provided in a SHTF scenario that the satellites weren't taken out - they are completely self contained and just broadcast regardless of what happens on the earth.
lllr_finger 7y ago
I chase storms in my free time, and there are still a lot of areas in the US where Internet connectivity is poor or non-existent. I had an idea for an e-ink powered device that pulled down satellite images like this, but I never got very far with it. Satellite data tells you pretty much everything you would need to forecast at a basic level, especially with the derived soundings.

brootstrap 7y ago

Personally i would say this is just a fun project and novelty factor of receiving a transmission from the satellite. If you actually want to get your hands on weather data and do useful stuff with it let NOAA do the heavy lifting. I can wager that most of us here probably dont want to write the code to seam together satellite images and clean them up. However i wont stop anyone, have at it friends.

xupybd 7y ago

To get better images you're going to need a better antenna. But if you have a use for the images is really up to you.

themodelplumber 7y ago

I appreciated these images during recent wildfires. They answered questions like, "is this smoke from something local or is it more likely from that fire that's 50 miles away," and you could also compare sets of imagery yourself which was kind of empowering.

exikyut 7y ago

Answering your question with a question... where do super-amazing-ultra-resolution satellite images come from, and can I download those using commodity/off-the-shelf equipment?

anilakar 7y ago

Lets put it this way: If you were doing this for something else than fun, you'd invest a bit more than ten bucks for a radio receiver USB dongle and some scrap metal wire.

blantonl 7y ago

If we ever got ourselves into a SHTF scenario (global thermonuclear war etc), the lack of local internet access could be a problem. The satellites you are receiving in this article are the NOAA-XX ones, which are completely self-contained and literally sweep the earth in Orbit broadcasting exactly what they see directly below them. This could function as a completely self contained weather forecasting tool only requiring solar power and no government based ground infrastructure to support. Current satellite pictures that you are used to seeing from the news and weather forecasting agencies use the GOES satellites, which actually rely on ground based infrastructure to process and then rebroadcast the products that are disseminated from them. (Think: downlink-process-uplink and then downlink to consumers). Provided in a SHTF scenario that the satellites weren't taken out - they are completely self contained and just broadcast regardless of what happens on the earth.

lllr_finger 7y ago

I chase storms in my free time, and there are still a lot of areas in the US where Internet connectivity is poor or non-existent. I had an idea for an e-ink powered device that pulled down satellite images like this, but I never got very far with it. Satellite data tells you pretty much everything you would need to forecast at a basic level, especially with the derived soundings.