Receiving Weather Satellite Pictures

Many years ago I built a kit receiver for capturing the pictures from polar orbiting weather satellites. Unfortunately it is no longer supported and can't receive the signals from the latest satellites. A few days ago I spotted an article written by two young lady amateur radio enthusiasts detailing how to use an SDR (software defined radio) to do the job. It can be found HERE.

This is the SDR



a receiver in a USB dongle which is controlled and tuned by software on a computer. The above mentioned article gives very clear, detailed instructions how to set things up on a Windows or Mac computer. I downloaded and installed everything needed for my MacBook.

The other thing required of course is an aerial. Several types are discussed in the article.
Fortunately I still had the aerial I built years ago.



This is the most complicated type to build and gives excellent reception.

There are three programs running on the computer.
One to control the SDR and tune it to the satellite signal.



One to decode the signal and build up the pictures.



The third is a hidden program used to channel the sound from the receiver to the map processor.

Received pictures look like this



in fact two pictures side by side, one normal light and the other IR.

Once they have been received the software processes them together, adds false colour and country outlines to produce different combinations:





Those are pictures I received this morning.
This has been a quick outline of what I did. If you fancy having a go do look at the article mention at the start of this post.