G7LTT's weather page

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For years I have wanted a weather satellite system. I have been fascinated with the idea of receiving my own pictures from the weather satellites rather than to see them on the TV. OK, so its a kind of a geeks thing to want to do but then, you know how us radio hams are? Now I think about it the only thing that's stopped me from doing it has been money which is quite a silly obstacle as I have been quite comfortable for the last 5 years or so.

I got transferred to New York and the office found me an apartment in downtown Manhattan. If you've been to Manhattan you'll know that there are quite a number of very tall buildings in a very small area. This isn't really very good for anything that uses low power radio. Just my luck that I got an apartment in the middle of all the tall buildings where I can hear anything!

This inability to hear anything prompted me to start building more equipment, a passion I've had for a while. I figured that I could bide my time building stuff whilst I waited for my company to sort out my visa issues by which time I could move into a house with better radio facilities.

So I built the RIG RX-2 receiver and the Ramsey Electronics WX-LNA and WX-ANT kits. That's all I needed to build a Polar Orbiting Weather Satellite System. I had to add a few bit of hardware like a metal box to put the receiver in and a HamComm style data slicer so that I could connect the receiver to my PC. All told I spent about £100 ($160).

Pictures that I received ...

01241108.jpg - the very first one!
01242213.jpg - the second one!
02020728.jpg - new antenna!
02050944-c.jpg - new software.
02051241.jpg - new software.
03051335-c.jpg - best one yet!

The Equipment that I use/used

The RIG RX-2 receiver
The WX-ANT antenna
The HamCom Data Slicer
Serial control for the RX-2

The Software that I use/used

WXSAT - decoder/recorder
Footprint - satellite tracker
You'll need Keplars too!
SatSignal by David Taylor
WXtrack by David Taylor

I'm going to start a collection of useful links. This is what I have so far;

A Guide to Decoding A.P.T. Weather Satellite Images Using a Sound-card and WXSAT software
WxSat Program Hints and Tips