Turn Your PC Into a Low-Cost Satellite Ground Station for NOAA Weather Imagery
A new guide on Public Lab walks Windows and macOS users through NOAA satellite imagery reception — and input is welcomed from Linux users.
If you've ever wanted to turn your PC into a ground station for reception of satellite data, you've a new resource to get you started: a step-by-step guide published on Public Lab.
The introductory guide is described by its authors, Public Lab users "sashae" and "sophied", as being in beta form — and covers only Windows or macOS operating systems. For those who use either, though, it's designed to get you started in receiving Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites — no experience required.
The guide is built around the use of low-cost, receive-only software defined radio (SDR) dongles - ranging from the popular RTL-SDR to more expensive devices like the AirSpy Mini and Funcube Dongle Pro+. These are combined with a circularly-polarised antenna and free software — SDR# for Windows users, CubicSDR for macOS users — to receive and later decode the transmissions.
"The images transmitted by NOAA satellites are produced by the satellite's primary scanning instrument called the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)," the pair explain. "The instrument is designed to detect five channels of radiant energy from the surface of the Earth ranging from the visible spectrum to the near-infrared and infrared or thermal spectra.
"As the satellite passes over a given part of the earth, the AVHRR sensors collect and transmit data in near-real time. Think of the satellite as scanning Earth's surface line by line. In the resulting images each pixel is approximately 4 × 4 km."
The full guide is now available on Public Lab; contributions are welcomed from anyone looking to expand it to cover additional operating systems.