Weather Satellite Image

jdee99

After much messing around and hair pulling finally managed to get a half decent picture from one of the NOAA weather satellites using a homemade QFH antenna and a €12 DVB-T dongle from ebay. Work in progress but not a bad start

Supercell

Very interesting jdee99 thanks for sharing. I'd like to have a go of that myself, were you following an online guide that you could share a link for?

jdee99

The QFH antenna I made to this design http://abdallah.hiof.no/QFH/index.html but there are loads of designs out there (google QFH antenna design) some using coax and some with copper pipe - bending the pipe for the one i built wasnt difficult as it was made from 8mm micro bore pipe. By all accounts the measurements werent critical anyway. The dongle was an RTL2832U DVB-T USB dongle a lot of the guides mention E4000 chipset but they tend to have been superseded by the 820 ones.

I am using SDR Sharp radio software - free and you can download it here http://sdrsharp.com or you can use HDSDR which is also free.

You need to install zadig from http://rtlsdr.org/softwarewindows and a copy of WXtrack which tracks the satellites as they go round the world. I then got a free copy of WXtoImg which is what I Used to produce the image above.

It sounds a pain to set up but its not as difficult as it sounds - if you need anymore help get in touch

One of the images from this afternoon

Iancar29

Thats awesome! , i'd be doing that too if i lived in my own place with a decent back garden!

jdee99

so long as you have line of sight you can pick up the signals from the satellite - there are about 12 passes a day

Supercell

Does the line of sight need to be straight up or horizon to horizon? Was thinking of making one of these and sticking it out the side of a pole i have above the roof with my anemometer and sungauge where it would have a clear view upwards but to the side on one side it would be partially obstructed i guess.
I love to tinker and this would be right up my alley, I was gonna put up a airplane tracker antenna already but this would be more interesting to do first i think.

jdee99

it is horizon to horizon but as there are three (four but one is playing up at the moment) satellites that can be tracked and they fly both north and south directions. if you get hold of a copy of WXTrack you can then add the NOAA 15, 17, 18 and 19 satellites and see the orbits that they take. Just because your blanked one way doesnt mean you wont get a signal.

The higher you can get your antenna the better and if your up above the ridgeline of the roof you should be okay to receive data.

And in truth if it doesnt work you can use the same dongle (different antenna) to track aircraft (check out http://radarspotting.com/) so you wont have lost anything.