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
(Score: 4, Informative) by pyg on Monday July 27 2015, @12:41AM
For amateur radio on a budget these little dongles are the most bang for buck out there above even Chinese made HTs. Another $5 gets you an smx to so239 or sma adapter as the given antenna is useless. The model he's talking about will tune 22 -1766 MHz so 12 meters through most of the cell phone bands. My radios (above mentiond HTs) don't have things like Close Call feature so I use the dongle to spot local 2 meter for interesting LMR/EMS stuff. I live super rural so not much to hear unless you know where to listen. Interestingly I recently picked up someone working on a cell tower nearby on a GMRS freq. with lots of profanity and only half the conversation as his ground crew wasn't propagating at all.