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DIY Satellite Ground Station to Receive NOAA Images
- reaperducer 6y agoThis seems like a lot of work. We used to do this with a $30 shortwave radio and a Commodore 64. Maybe the NOAA WEFAX transmissions aren't in shortwave anymore?
- jcims 6y agoIt’s just a very thorough doc that takes you from zero to hero. The process is extremely simple. I used to do this back when the RTL SDR stuff just started and the ridiculously bad antennas that i built that still worked were pretty remarkable.
- kbr2000 6y agoGood times, I've done this with DWD (German meteorological service) in the 90s, using HamComm [0] This project in the article however, listens directly to satellites, and not to a LF/HF ground-based station like we used to do. [0] https://www.pervisell.com/ham/hc1.htm https://www.pervisell.com/ham/hc1.htm
- kbr2000 6y agoOops, lost my memory there for a bit: it was probably using the same DIY "Hamcomm modem", and using JVFAX (or similar) software running under DOS.
- msandford 6y agoThis is the image direct from the satellite rather than a rebroadcast. You see what the satellite sees as it passes over in realtime. WEFAX is still a thing from what I can tell, but I haven't been able to pick anything up yet as I suspect my "random wire" antenna doesn't have enough random wire yet.
- wl 6y agoShortwave is really tough in urban environments these days because of all the electrical noise from poorly-designed electronic devices. If you live in a single family home, try turning off your power at the breaker box, powering your radio off of a 12 V battery, and see how well you can do. Alternatively, take your station to a rural campground.
- NovemberWhiskey 6y agoWhen you're picking up a radio-facsimile transmission, you're picking it up from a ground-station that's transmitting a weather forecast product that's generated by the National Weather Service and intended for reception with consumer-level technology. What's described in the article is receiving raw imagery directly from the satellite; so it's not really the same thing.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoIt blew my mind back in the 80s when I read an article on how to get my humble home computer receive satellite maps. Unfortunately I didn't own a shortwave radio and I couldn't convince my parents to buy one because the weather was already on the local news every night. One of the early articles on the subject is a fun read: https://archive.org/details/198502Rainbow/page/n41/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/198502Rainbow/page/n41/mode/2up
- btashton 6y agoYou can also get with some more work the much higher resolution HIRT images from the GOES sats. It's kind or fun to mess with. I used it as an excuse to mess with offloading the error correction to an FPGA, which was fun but also totally unnecessary. https://pietern.github.io/goestools/guides/minimal_receiver.html https://pietern.github.io/goestools/guides/minimal_receiver....
- jcims 6y agoThat’s super tempting, those pics are gorgeous.
- westpfelia 6y agoI'm looking to get into this sort of stuff for fun, do you have a resource where you started to learn all about it from? Also would you say that using the gear that was specified in OP's post you could achieve the same results you got? Thanks
- dessant 6y agoA crash course on hacking satellites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24072829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24072829
- gardenfelder 6y agoThe parabolic grid antenna in that link does not appear to be available
- xconverge 6y agoDo you happen to be located in CA?
- aseidl 6y agoYou can get by with one designed for 2.4GHz wifi if those are easier to acquire. They were < $50 on Amazon when I did my build a year or so ago. Just have to flatten the front a bit and push it out by about an inch. I used a short piece of pvc pipe and some zipties.
- alexchamberlain 6y agoAre images received from satellites like this free to use, or does some license apply?
- Rebelgecko 6y agoImagery that the government chooses to release is typically public domain. Our tax dollars at work.
- HumblyTossed 6y agoFree, usually. AccuWeather tried to change that a number of years ago, but they failed. Thankfully.
- Taniwha 6y agoWe used to do this back in the mid 70s, we built a VHF receiver (and someone outside in the frost with a big antenna listening to the noise floor and tracking) - the signal was an analog FSK (you can kind of imagine it as a single light sensor and the satellite spinning, getting 1 scan line per revolution) - we'd feed the signal to a TV in a dark room with a manual vertical sync button, and with a camera pointing at it. As the signal started someone would press the sync button and someone else would open the camera shutter when the pass was done we'd close the shutter and wind the film on, we'd get 2-3 passes a night,at around midnight we'd develop the film. There was also a much faster broadcast around midnight from a geostationary satellite - 12 images (4 around the equator and 4 around the poles) with the communist countries carefully blanked out, you had to change the scanning rates and be nimble with the camera. It was fun and the alternative was a close to $1m fax ground station (this was before faxes were something most people had even seen)
- phreeza 6y ago> (and someone outside in the frost with a big antenna listening to the noise floor and tracking) I've wondered about this, why were consumer satellite dishes so huge back in the day, and now we seem to be able to get away with much smaller ones? Is the transmitter power on to he satellites higher than it used to be? Or is it better receiver electronics? Or better algorithms/codecs?
- madengr 6y agoYes, all three in combination. GaAs PA, low cost GaAs LNA, and Turbo coding are what made it possible in the 90’s. You’ll notice that many dishes are wedged shaped than circular. This is to keep the beam width under the 2 degree spacing of geostationary satellites.
- karmicthreat 6y agoAlso we have increases the frequencies that we use. Back then it was C-Band, now everyone is using Ku or higher.
- Taniwha 6y ago
- mkr-hn 6y agoIf you like this, there's a subreddit for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ Other NOAA-related projects: https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/search?q=NOAA&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/search?q=NOAA&restrict_sr=on...
- zymhan 6y agoAnd if you want to put that RTL-SDR to a specific use by tracking airplanes, you should check out https://www.reddit.com/r/ADSB/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ADSB/
- jaimex2 6y agohttps://zoom.earth https://zoom.earth if you just want to see the recent images.
- AzuraJergen 6y agoGood note (+1)
- xhrpost 6y agoWow, if you zoom in really far, the resolution seems to exceed that of Google maps. I can make out shingles on roofs of homes, so it must be what, a quarter foot res?
- ghostpepper 6y agoThe detail there is incredible. Anyone know if it's possible to import this imagery into QGIS?
- weagle05 6y agoI've been trying to do this with my son for a few weeks. I haven't been able to get any of the Mac compatible SDR tools to work with Catalina. I haven't tried it yet but our next step is using GNU Radio with a RaspPi
- zymhan 6y agoHave you trying installing GNU Radio via macports? That may help. https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/MacInstall#Prerequisite:_X11.app.2C_recommended_via_XQuartz https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/MacInstall#Prerequisite:...
- mthoms 6y agoI think this is really cool, I'm genuinely curious if there's any advantage of it versus getting the image from NOAA's website? In other words, is there any data or imagery gathered this way that you can't get from NOAA? (I realize there would be a slight delay before the imagery is available from NOAA). I'm not trying to take anything away from this awesome project, I'm just curious.
- reaperducer 6y agoIt's useful for places where there is no internet connectivity, or where connectivity is very expensive. For example, ships at sea, to whom this sort of information is most important.