Tuning in for the weather and other satellites

martinsvi

Hi,

I do apologise if this has been discussed before, I did use search, unfortunately I did had trouble to refine my search so it came up with a lot of unnecessary stuff..

So I have a Bearcat scanner and a "mobile" 50 cm antenna that works very well allowing me to listen some ATC stuff. What I got really excited about was that apparently you can tune in for NOAA satellites and using certain software turn their signal into images. I haven't tried that yet as so far NOAA's are only close when I'm either sleeping or at work. Some internet resources indicate that tomorrow evening I should be able to hear something..

what noise/sound am I looking for? Is it like a 90-ies style dial-up modem sound?

also - are there any other satellites that I can try to tune in for? if so - what are their frequencies and how should I interpret (with what software) their signals?

PauloMN

Have a look at this to give you an idea of how it works:
http://youtu.be/f8sKhDimdqA

It would be worth building an antenna for 137MHz to give you better results. You can set this up on a temporary basis outside if you don't want it up permanently.

More info:
http://www.g4ilo.com/wxsats.html

watty

I use a discone on the chimney as it's not really directional and cheap scanner.

A higher gain directional aerial needs pan & tilt head to track the satellite and the wide IF bandwidth of a cheap scanner means you don't have to continuously retune to cope with doppler shift.

Though if you have suitable receiver with serial or USB tuning control and a computer controlled pan & tilt motor you can then automatically track and have a much longer "pass".

My PC software I use (earphone socket to sound card in with a 3.5mm jack cable) tells me the time and frequency and pops up an alert and also automatically stores and decodes the data.

martinsvi

thanks, can you tell me the name of the software?

EDIT: so I heard NOAA 17 this evening, signal seemed good. I didn't had the cable handy so I didn't record anything unfortunately... Anyway - what's the duration of signal that it needs to draw a decent image? I mean, I'll probably will record it (rather than trying to decode it on the fly) and I was wondering what's the minimum duration?

watty

http://www.wxtoimg.com/