Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Low Cost Weather Satellite Image Receiver

posted by janrinok on Sunday July 26 2015, @08:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-going-to-rain-or-go-dark-before-tomorrow dept.

tonyPick writes:

Here is a rather cool demonstration of receiving weather satellite images with a low cost USB dongle.

There are several American NOAA weather satellites in a polar orbit around Earth, each of which will pass the same point below every 12 hours or so. The satellites transmit pictures via FM radio at 137MHz. Using a DAB/FM/Freeview dongle, you can receive this signal on a computer running software-defined radio (SDR) software, and then decode it into a picture.

The receiver in this case is a Nooelec R820T USB Dongle, and several other neat SDR applications are also possible with this hardware.

Originally spotted on Lobsters

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Low Cost Weather Satellite Image Receiver | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 5 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Sunday July 26 2015, @09:09PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Sunday July 26 2015, @09:09PM (#213979)

    The dongles are widespread, but it would be nice to have the Mac software procedure translated into the equivalent Linux or Windows.

    This is really quite an awesome piece of data that , and I say this with tongue in cheek, can be used without internet connectivity.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by khedoros on Sunday July 26 2015, @09:34PM

    by khedoros (2921) on Sunday July 26 2015, @09:34PM (#213987)
    The only Mac-specific piece of software was SoundFlower, which he was using to receive the audio output by CubicSDR and send it to WXtoIMG. CubicSDR and WXtoIMG both have Windows, OSX, and Linux ports, so it seems like the only challenge would be to figure out the sound system configuration options necessary to get the audio data from one program to the other. That shouldn't be too hard to work out.