Per Aspera Ad Astra

Meteorological satellites

Receiving and decoding weather satellites in LEO and GEO orbit from the Győr ground station.

Reception and decoding

Among the meteorological satellites reachable from our Győr station, we set out to decode the freely receivable ones in both LEO and GEO orbit. For the NOAA and METEOR satellites in LEO we use a refurbished QFH antenna and an RTL-SDR V3.

For GOES 13 and FengYun 2H in GEO we use a home-made front end built from a tin can, plus a Nooelec band-pass filter and amplifier. The low elevation angle is a challenge: how to pick up low-level satellite signals amid terrestrial noise.

Besides the cloud cover forming over Asia and the Americas, we are curious about African and European cloud images too. Here we experiment with receiving EUMETSAT satellites. We obtained the necessary receiver card and the hardware dongle required for decoding. After long experimentation and consultation with EUMETSAT and the Hungarian Meteorological Service, we managed to receive and decode our first weather images.

Our first attempts are not that spectacular, but they are our first images and we are proud of them! The wind and temperature maps that followed, however, are stunning. We report on the results continuously.