M0DTS Weather Station
Loc: IO94IL, Hilton, Yarm.
Weather Satellite Pictures
I have always had an interest in the weather but more towards extreme weather.. i have over the last few years got receiving equipment for receiving the polar orbiting weather satellites from NOAA, and also later for receiving meteosat.
The receiver i have for the noaa satellites is a RIG (remote imaging group http://www.rig.co.uk) RX-2. This is a specially make receiver (in kit form) for the sattelite downlink frequencies on 137MHz in FM. I managed to get hold of one of these receivers at the great lumley radio rally about 3 years ago and was an excellent buy which included a pre-amp for 137MHz as well!.
For an antenna on 137MHz i am using a quadrafilier antenna which looks like this:
This was my best attemp at building one of these from microbore central heating tubing but seems to work very well with the preamp in line. The pictures that you can get look something like this which i took sometime early last year.
Weather picture NOAA 17 example that i have received.
Effects can be added to the pictures to colourise them and country outlines can be added to make them a little easier to read with all the cloud cover we usually have over the UK :-)
Eventually i hope to have the receiver running full time and put the latest images onto GB3KM TV Repater via packet if possible.. Also the meteosat images would be nice but i need a larger dish for that really.
Larger areas can be seen by the signals from the meteosat geostationary satellite in blocks, but all of one side of the globe can be seen from its position and full globe pictures can be received. This is not for long though as it seems that this downlink will be switched off at the end of 2005?? mybe... i hope not.
First D2 Image from meteosat with 60cm dish and no pre-amp.
The new weather satellite data that can be accessed from the hotbird satellite on 13e looks very interesting and there are some high resolution pictures to be got. just it seems to be too much hastle to leave running for long periods requiring two slower pc's to decode the data, or one high spec pc but that leaves no resources for usual work...... i think this will be the way to go soon but until it is a one pc job it will not work for me.