Another use for your radio

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Blinky
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Another use for your radio

Post by Blinky »

In case you did not realise, most reasonably modern amateur radio transcievers are capable of reasonable results when looking at weather satellites. For this one I used my Yaesu FT847.

My antenna is only about 4 metres high, just above the gutter of the house and lashed to a pole with electrical insulation tape as I did not have a proper bracket handy.

Click on the images to view in a larger size.

Image

I have cropped out the noise at beginning and end. This was NOAA 19 a couple of days ago. The images are received in various shades of grey and the software adds colour to them.

Image

Software used for this one was WXtoImg (http://www.wxtoimg.com) but I have also been trying APT Decoder (http://www.poes-weather.com) recently.
Image

There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary and those who do not.
Clontarf[X]
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Re: Another use for your radio

Post by Clontarf[X] »

Very cool.
Bonez
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Re: Another use for your radio

Post by Bonez »

Very good indeed. I have just got back on the air after taking a bit of a break. Satellites are something that interest me a lot and I am researching about it how, will start with something nice and easy like an FM repeater. Do Know of any birds that pass over VK6 with a 2m uplink and 70cm downlink?

At the moment all I've got is a 2m rig and a scanner, so if it was a low orbit bird then I may have some luck.

Cheers
Bonez
Blinky
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Re: Another use for your radio

Post by Blinky »

If you look at the satellite status page from AMSAT (http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/status.php) it will
tell you which satellite is still active and the frequencies it uses. AO-51, SO-50 and ISS, when activated, are probably the most used that fit your request. Not that there's a lot of activity on them. AO-27 also shows as still active but I have never listened for it.

The weather satellites transmit on 137.1 137.5 137.62 137.9125 depending on which satellite it is. Easily copied on a scanner although for better results a wider bandwidth is better. The picture I showed above was still copied with a narrow bandwidth FM transciever with similar bandwidth to your scanner most likely.
Image

There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary and those who do not.
slipknot
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Re: Another use for your radio

Post by slipknot »

Blinky wrote:In case you did not realise, most reasonably modern amateur radio transcievers are capable of reasonable results when looking at weather satellites. For this one I used my Yaesu FT847.

My antenna is only about 4 metres high, just above the gutter of the house and lashed to a pole with electrical insulation tape as I did not have a proper bracket handy.

Click on the images to view in a larger size.

Image

I have cropped out the noise at beginning and end. This was NOAA 19 a couple of days ago. The images are received in various shades of grey and the software adds colour to them.

Image

Software used for this one was WXtoImg (http://www.wxtoimg.com) but I have also been trying APT Decoder (http://www.poes-weather.com) recently.
wow, you got it just perfect too, anyone who does weather satelite photo recieving would know that if you have just a plain antenna, its hard to get a full pic without the annoying lines through the middle from temopory loss of signal.
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