AMATEUR WEATHER SATELLITE RECEPTION
Welcome to my weather satellite information page. Over time I wish to provide details of my own investigations
and experiments into the reception of the various direct sources of weather satellite imagery.
For decades the amateur community has had two major sources of direct broadcast data - APT (Automated Picture
Transmission) on the 137MHz band and Wefax (Weather Facsimile) at 1691MHz. Both these analog signals are based
on the original facsimile systems that ran with an audio signal that could be sent over a telephone line, ie: a 2400Hz
'carrier' with the picture information and line synchronisation pulse AM modulated onto it. This could be fed directly
to a dedicated 'drum recorder' fax machine that produced an image on paper. For years now, enthusiasts with a homebuilt
antenna and a good quality comms receiver with wideband FM (WFM) demodulation capability have been able to feed the
2400Hz audio into a computer soundcard. With a range of free or low cost software available, this input signal is
processed into high quality weather satellite pictures.
ENTER THE DIGITAL AGE
As with most things, progress comes along and makes a simple but good thing into a complicated and difficult thing.
Newer generations of satellites are now flying with all digital datastreams that require more complex receivers and
a whole new approach to the software processing stages. LRIT (Low Rate Information Transmission) has largely replaced
Wefax from geostationary weather satellites. LRPT (Low Rate Picture Transmission) has been much slower to arrive. An
aborted attempt aboard Metop was turned off after interference with other on-board instruments. With the launch of
the Russian, Meteor M N1 satellite, we have had access to LRPT since the last quarter of 2009.

Links To Work to Date

This new Russian spacecraft, Meteor M N1, is the first LRPT signal source and has peaked my interest. As the hardware
setup is similar, I have also received NOAA APT as well, using WXtoImg. I have managed to pick up a 1.5metre SatTV
dish from my local waste transfer station for $15, so I have also received LRIT from MTSAT-1R and COMS.

This website is always under construction so please check back regularly for new information and pages.

News and Latest Updates

Last updated - 08th FEBRUARY 2012

NEW! Software download pages added! Click on the link above.
A short demonstration of how to construct a colorised image is now available in the Satcolor download area.
These pages and programs are under major construction - please check back regularly.

NEW! SATCOLOR! The new program that allows you to make true and false color composite
images from your raw, multi-spectral data. Combine MTSAT Visible and the Infra-Red channel to make
brilliant color images or simply use the system to explore and enhance the single channel greyscale data.

CCSDS SOURCE CODE released! Use this code to build your own programs.
The CCSDS UNRAVELLER program has been built with these functions to demonstrate their use.
This program gives you a quick introduction to the CCSDS protocol and how to extract the imagery.

CCSDS UNRAVELLER is now updated to Version 0.95a! It is a program you can use to learn all about the
CCSDS data from Meteor and MTSAT (and any other compliant satellite). This program will decode each step
along the way and show you how with its companion source code. Version 0.95a has had 'batch processing'
mode added. Along with text-based configuration files you can now not only set the default startup condition
of the program, but also run it from the command line, fully automated. You also have access to the batch
processing system from the GUI.
Ver 0.95a-01 has -x flag added to command line options.

LRITVIEW now has an option to merge the 10 segment files together and save the image out to disk.
This is early days and I plan to add more image handling and possibly save file formats soon, but
at least it gets you going with data to use in SATCOLOR.
The save file fomat is currently only PORTABLE PIMAP (PPM) - the P5 version for greyscale.

Please report any bugs in these programs.

Weather satellites visible from Southern Australia include:

Weather satellite special interest groups

Contact me or share your experiences.



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