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Receive your own Weather Satellite Images!

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posted on Sep, 1 2004 @ 07:04 AM
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Just a little of interest of mine I'd thought I'd share with you all:

Did you know you can receive live images of the Earth from the many Geostationary and Polar orbiting satellites round the Earth?
I know you can download a lot of them off the internet these days, but it's more exciting in my opinion (if you like that sort of thing) to get them yourself... And of course it means that anything 'interesting' cannot be edited out by TPTB because your getting the images at the same time as them!!

There are different quality images sent by different methods, but the cheapest and easiest is to receive the APT (Automatic Picture Transmission) signals from the Polar orbiting NOAA satellites around on 137.500 and 137.620MHz. For this you just need an antenna (I use a QFH antenna which I would recommend building as they cost anything from about �200 - �600 from what I've seen!), a weather satellite receiver and a computer running free software. I am currently using a scanner while I wait for my receiver to arrive, which does not provide as good as a result due to it's narrower bandwidth, but can still produce a recognisable result as you can see below.
The image below was received at about 10:42 UTC on 1st Sep 2004.

What's interesting is that rather than taking a picture as such and sending it, the satellite works like a sort of giant scanner in the sky, sending it line by line as it moves over the surface, so it is truely in real time.

There are other methods which can produce higher resolutions and more data, but they cost lots of money, so I'm not bothering with them at the moment!

I've cropped this down a bit anyway but it gives you a rough idea of what can be achieved at home:



I welcome any questions!

EDIT - I took the image away because I needed the space and no-one seems interested - if anyone is I will put it back - just let me know..



[Edited on 1-9-2004 by AgentSmith]

[Edited on 3-9-2004 by AgentSmith]



 
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